by Pip Granger
Owen learned the catering trade at secondary school: ‘I went to Westminster College, at Ebury Bridge. It used to be part of the catering school in Vincent Square, which is still there. It was split in two halves in those days, the chefs and the engineering side, and I was on the engineering side. Just after the war, you could just stay at school until you were fifteen, or change school at thirteen and do a three-year technical course, which is what I did.’
Technical colleges were seen as an alternative to apprenticeship, teaching you a trade much more quickly. ‘At St Martin’s school,’ Ronnie Mann remembers, ‘they would assess you after a couple of years, and say you’re never going to be Brain of Britain, but you can go to a technical college where you can do electricity, bricklaying, carpentry, decorating. To me, the amount of kids that wanted to do that was absolutely incredible. A lot of the kids who left and went to these places are still doing the same job today.’
It was not just the boys who benefited from this system. ‘I learned millinery at Bloomsbury Technical College in Southampton Row,’ Pat Jones remembers. ‘After two years they couldn’t teach me any more, so I got a job at King’s Model Milliners in Sloane Square. But after making hats for everybody and being paraded around as their best girl at the college, all I was going to do at King’s was make the tea. So my mum went back to my teacher at the college and complained that it was not for me. Then I was offered a job with Hardy Amies, but the money was ridiculous, five shillings, seven and six a week, so I turned that down and got a job at Berman’s, the theatrical costumiers.’
After a year or so at Berman’s, something happened that upset Pat. ‘So in my lunch hour I walked over to B J Simmons in Covent Garden. They were rival costumiers, but they were not so much about the stars; they used to do the D’Oyly Carte, all the shows, the choruses and stuff. I walked in and asked to see the personnel person there, I told her I was seventeen, and I was a milliner who had been working for Berman’s – and they took me on.’
A gift for handicrafts ran in Pat’s family: ‘My mother was a housekeeper for a firm of coal factors; she took over the job from her mother-in-law, but she also worked as a designer of dresses and jumpers – knitwear mainly, and crochet. She would sit up all night making up these patterns, then take them in a huge case to Odhams Press, you know, the women’s magazines, to sell the patterns. She would get so many guineas according to who she sold it to. Nine times out of ten she kept the garments, so we had lots to wear.’
Those who decided not to go to technical college but to stay on at school until the leaving age of fifteen, did not go straight on to the dole queue. There was a great variety of jobs awaiting the school leaver in the fifties and early sixties, as Graham Jackson remembers: ‘I had a choice. It was like, what do you want to do? There was a furniture-maker’s in Great Queen Street who did all the Masonic work, furniture and regalia and all that sort of thing. There was Pollard’s the shopfitters, they were at Highbury. And there was France, the undertaker, and I went for that.’
At that time, France, based in Lamb’s Conduit Street, Clerkenwell, had a shop just off Monmouth Street. The firm, which had been founded in the nineteenth century in St James’s, was the only undertaker in the West End. Graham was trained on the job. ‘I went right through it, from a boy, done all the polishing, putting the handles on, lining all the coffins, then making them, going out on funerals, conducting funerals, I done the lot. The one thing I wouldn’t do was embalming.’
Graham’s training on the job did not amount to an apprenticeship, but the fact that there were so many traditional crafts around meant that there were plenty of those available, too. John Carnera could not follow the family trade in terrazzo mosaic: ‘I suffered from eczema and in those days people didn’t use gloves or anything like that, so that would have been a real trial for me.’ He fell into bespoke shoemaking – a craft he has followed for half a century – quite casually. ‘The Youth Employment Officer came round to the school and asked what I wanted to do. I told him I had no idea. He says there was a job going at this shoemaker’s in Duke Street, St James’s. “Do you want to have a go at that?” I said “All right then,” and trotted down to Poulsen Skone Ltd at 12 Duke Street, and they took me on.
‘I couldn’t be an apprentice straight away because you had to be sixteen, so I spent a year polishing shoes, basically. Then, on my sixteenth birthday, my father signed me up to stay for five years, and I learned the trade there. I started on £3 a week, going up by five shillings each year. I thought it was a lot of money. I’d never had my own clothes, always had my brother’s hand-me-downs. The first time I ever went out to buy my own clothes, new, you can’t imagine how pleased I was, how happy I was to have clothes that had never been worn by anyone else before.
‘There was a lot to learn. First of all, you have to see the client, measure his foot, instep, bottom instep across the joint, instep to heel, all the appropriate measures, then use rasps to carve a wooden last. You start with a foot-shaped block of a hard wood such as beech or birch, as it has to take quite a beating, and shape it according to the measurements. You design the upper on a piece of paper, then cut the various pieces in leather, the uppers and the linings from that design. That’s called clicking, because the knife you use makes a clicking sound as you cut. So that’s the last-maker, and the pattern-cutter and the clicker, who’s usually the same person.
‘From there it goes to the closer, who stitches all the pieces together and punches out all the holes. Number five is the bottom-maker, who cuts an insole from the shape of the last, and from that cuts a toe stiffener and a heel stiffener and blocks them in. Then he lasts the shoe: you have to damp the leather, and work it when it’s mellow, using pincers to pull it over the last, to get its shape. He then sews a welt, which holds the upper to the sole, and then sticks a sole on, and hand-stitches it. Then he builds a heel to make the finished shoe.
‘You draw the last out when the shoe is dry, rub out the inside, fit the heel sock, then put in a pair of fitted trees, that are turned, by lathe, from the last. Then the finished shoe goes to the polisher, who polishes it up. The whole process takes three months. The person who does the bottom half of the shoe is usually known as the shoemaker, so people assume he does it all, but someone who does the whole shoe is rarely much good, so we’re all specialists in different areas, although you usually learn more than one.
‘I did a five-year course at the Cordwainers’ Technical College in Mare Street, Hackney, two evenings a week. Poulsen & Skone paid for my tuition. On Tuesday evening I used to do clicking and on Wednesday evening pattern cutting and designing. And then I had a day release all day Friday doing last-making and shoemaking. I passed my City & Guilds after five years, and then at twenty-one my old governor, Mr Skone, offered me a job at £6 10s. a week.
‘I said I would have to talk to my dad, because in those days fathers, especially Italian fathers, ruled the roost. So I went home and told him, and my dad said, “Well, I don’t think that’s enough.” He was a friend of the manager of Gamba, who made ballet shoes at the corner of Dean Street and Old Compton Street, next door to where we used to live. So he went to see his friend next day, and told him what I had been offered, and asked if they had a job for me, because he thought I could do better. “Oh yes,” he said, “We’ll give him £8 10s. a week.” So my father told me to tell Mr Skone that it wasn’t enough, I wanted £8 10s. a week, because I could get a job cutting shoes at Gamba’s for that.
‘So I did, and Mr Skone said, “No, I don’t think you’re worth it.” That’s how they used to talk to you. You were just a slave. I told him that that’s what I had been offered, and he said, “You better go then.”
‘I thought that was it, and I wandered downstairs to our workshop in the basement, and the company secretary, a really nice man called Bannister, who was Skone’s right-hand man – he ran the business for him, basically – chased me downstairs. “Don’t do anything hasty,” he said. “Let me talk to Mr Skone.” So he
did, and a few days later Skone came back to me and said he wanted to see me in his office.
‘“Well, OK,” he says, “Mr Bannister’s told me lots of things, and I’ll give you £8 10s. a week, but I want you to bring your cutting board up here, I want to watch you, see that you’re worth what I’m giving you.” And that’s what I did, for three months, did my cutting upstairs in the shop. It must have worked!’
It must have, as John now co-owns Cleverley’s, a bespoke shoemaker in an arcade just off Bond Street.
John’s experiences with wages were pretty typical. Apprenticeship was not an easy option. Not everyone could stick it out. His boyhood friend, John Solari, for instance, was apprenticed as a mechanic in a garage at the back of Belgrave Square, but the wages were so bad that he quit for a job in the Post Office, at Mount Pleasant.
One place where there were plenty of opportunities in the West End was the rag trade. The making of clothes incorporated even more separate crafts and specialities than shoemaking, and it made sense for all these specialist workers to be in the same area, and for the people who supplied them and sold their wares – wholesale or retail – to be there too. Berwick Street, especially the north end between Broadwick Street and Oxford Street, was the centre of the rag trade in Soho, with virtually every address housing a business related to clothing and accessories. Handbag makers, lace manufacturers, silk merchants, working tailors (men’s and women’s), hosiery makers, drapers, costume makers, manufacturing milliners, buttonholers, gown makers-up, trimmings dealers, belt makers (men’s and women’s), mantle manufacturers, embroiderers, woollen merchants, gown makers, blouse manufacturers, retail tailors, children’s clothes makers, textile merchants, button manufacturers, gown sellers, blouse makers-up, uniform makers, button dyers, rayon dealers, dressmakers, and feather, flower and novelties dealers: all of them could be found in Berwick Street in the fifties. Although most worked to supply the trade, some were prepared to take on a personal commission, as Ronnie Mann remembers: ‘I had my wedding suit made up in Berwick Street at a place called Paul’s; most expensive suit I ever bought, that was.’
In the schmutter (from the Yiddish meaning ‘clothing’ or ‘rag’) trade, the word ‘cabbage’ has never had anything at all to do with mounds of greens and Sunday dinners. One of the most skilled and important people employed in the trade was the cutter, whose job it was to cut out the pieces for as many garments as possible from each bale of cloth supplied for a particular order. For example, a designer and the fashion house may have estimated that fifty garments can be cut from a bale of fabric and supply the manufacturer with the requisite amount of material for their order. However, a skilled cutter may get fifty-three garments out of a bale by clever placing of the pieces. Those extra garments have always been known, for some reason, as ‘cabbage’, and an illicit cabbage trade has always run parallel with the legitimate rag trade. Some dealers even specialized in cabbage. Sometimes the sweatshop/factory owner was in on the scam, and sometimes it was something that the cutters and machinists did on the side, by way of workers’ perks to make up for the low wages paid by unscrupulous employers.
Naturally, cabbage was the bane of designers’ and fashion houses’ lives, because the garments were identical to their product but could be sold for a fraction of their retail price in markets, pubs and small provincial shops that were well away from the prying eyes of clients and the law. Cabbage was (and remains) the fashion industry’s equivalent of bootleg music and films, infuriating to the legitimate side of the industry due to the loss of income and the status of their product, but very good news for the more economically challenged among the rag trade workers and their grateful punters.
This is perhaps one reason why people in Soho always seemed a little better dressed than their equivalents elsewhere. ‘Several tailors came to our church, so we were all very well turned out, in suits,’ Francesco Camisa remembered. The suits may not have had the cachet of a Savile Row label, but they were made up by the men and women who made suits for Savile Row, so they had the quality.
While many of the jobs available in the rag trade were basically drudge work, there was always the possibility of advancement. John Carnera remembers that his best friend, Peter Enrione, who lived in 8 Old Compton Street, ‘started as an apprentice at a place called La Chasse, which was just off Berkeley Square, I think Hill Street, and went on to become the Queen’s dressmaker. La Chasse was one of the London fashion houses, and he started off there as a tailor, and progressed from there to working for Norman Hartnell. Hartnell’s number two was Ian Thomas, and Ian’s number two was Peter Enrione.’
This time-honoured background in the rag trade helped one of Soho’s streets became a national, then international byword for fashion in the sixties. The mods started frequenting clothes shops in Carnaby Street in the early sixties, but apart from a few discreet boutiques and Italian tailors, it was no different from any other street in Soho until the psychedelic fashion explosion made it the place to go to buy the clobber that would help you to emulate your rock ’n’ roll heroes and their girlfriends. By 1962, Carnaby Street was flourishing and was a Mecca for anyone wishing to be ‘with it’. As Carnaby Street shopkeeper, Peter Anderson, recalls in Soho by Judith Summers, ‘it was a retailer’s dream. The street was packed with teenagers, and all of them ready to spend. We were closing the door on them. We were coining it. We were literally standing on money because we couldn’t get it in the till. And everything we sold had to have Carnaby Street written on it.’
Thanks to the likes of John Stephen, the first retailer in Carnaby Street to cater specifically to young, male fashionistas, blokes ditched the greys, blacks and browns that had long dominated their wardrobe and broke out into brilliant colour. Girls and boys alike donned the eye-swivelling, swirly patterns of psychedelia: Carnaby Street and its patrons positively reeked of patchouli oil for a decade or so, and peace and love ruled. Local florists did well too. Echoes of the sixties remain in Carnaby Street, although today it is frequented by tourists rather than young people at the forefront of fashion.
Ronnie Mann’s wife, Sandra, ‘can remember Carnaby Street starting, because I worked in Great Marlborough Street in the offices of Warwick Woollens. My aunt was a matcher, who worked for John Kavanaugh. She used to go round with the little samples, matching up materials they needed for certain things. That was just when Carnaby Street started. I can’t remember what Carnaby Street looked like before all that happened. Just can’t picture it. Just like Poland Street, one of those little Georgian side streets with ordinary shopfronts.’
Ronnie agrees that there was little to distinguish it. ‘When I first knew Carnaby Street, at the beginning of the fifties, it was just another side street. There was a big frame-maker’s near there called Wheatley’s, who were the cutting edge of technology and weird design, while we was all about tradition, so when we had a job that didn’t suit us, I used to walk over there to them. It was just off Carnaby Street – Foubert’s Place. Carnaby Street was an ordinary street, ordinary shops.’
Yet many of those ‘ordinary’ shops in the West End had extraordinary things going on in them. Mike O’Rouke’s family had worked in Covent Garden market for generations, but as his father had lost his leg in a childhood accident, he could not do heavy work, and had to look further afield. ‘One of his jobs,’ Mike remembers, ‘was up at Green Park station, working for a firm of taxidermists. He used to go in there of a Saturday morning, to open up and things like that. He quite often met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh; they used to go in there to look at the exhibits and all that. It was quite funny, him coming home and saying, “Oh, the Queen popped in today.”’
Then there were the specialist shops selling unlikely goods, such as the tack shop in St Martin’s Lane where you could buy a saddle, or Wisden’s cricket shop in Great Newport Street, which sold everything to do with cricket – bats, balls, stumps, pads and scorebooks, as well as the famous year-book – in an area far from anywhere where it
was safe to ride or you could find enough greenery to make a wicket.
Pollocks Toy Museum in Monmouth Street was a lovely fantasy world that sold toys; here you could simply marvel at the collection of Victoriana, such as the toy theatres. The Old Curiosity Shop, which inspired Dickens’s novel, was near Lincoln’s Inn Fields. And, opposite Freemasons’ Hall in Great Queen Street, Toye, Kenning & Spencer sold Freemasons’ regalia.
‘The oldest building in the West End was an Elizabethan house built in 1601 in Lower John Street,’ Derek Hunt reminded me. ‘They used to repair watches there, repair clocks.’ He also remembered ‘The violin shop just by Duck Lane, at the end of Broadwick Street. You can tell from the building that before that it used to be the Butchers’ Arms, a pub.’ One of my own favourite shopfronts was the perruquiers (wig-makers) in lower Wardour Street, where, according to Derek again, there was an arch whose foundation stones were laid by Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Irving.
Owen Gardner, who spent his entire working life in retail, particularly remembers a specialist shop in Greek Street, Madame Cadec’s. ‘She was a Frenchwoman, and she had a tiny, tiny shop, a little curio shop, things hanging from the ceiling and everything else, and she specialized in copperware. She would drive to France, buy bits and pieces, and bring them back and sell them in her shop. At Page’s, we used to sell exactly the same copperware, but everybody went to her; she used to sell more copperware than we did, although we had a shop five times the size, because they thought it was something different. In actual fact, the copperware came out of the same factory in Birmingham.
‘But she was a lovely character, did things that we as a business couldn’t do. She’d go and see the chef, and the chef would say, “I can’t afford to buy any pans,” and she would ask what he could afford. He might say “A bag of potatoes” or something, so she would give him the two pans, but give a bill for a sack of potatoes. She worked there right up to the day she died. She had a heart attack driving back from crossing the Channel up to London, and ran off the road.’