by Pip Granger
Owen also reminded me about the tradesmen who supported the retailers. One stuck in his mind, although not necessarily for the character of the shopfront. ‘There were all kinds of people in the West End who did signs for windows, and stuff like that. I always remember as a fairly young lad, I used to go in to this particular place that did all our window signs, for the sales and that, and in the back room it had pictures all over the wall of – I was going to say every star you could think of, but that would be an exaggeration – all in the nude; Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors, all these people. I don’t know where they got the photographs from, but they were all stuck up on the wall there.’
I remember some wonderful tiling in the shops in Soho, in butchers’ shops particularly. Hammet’s had lovely tiling. And I also liked the distinctive art deco lettering that picked out the name, ‘Benoit Bulke, butchers, charcutiers’, at 27 Old Compton Street. The sign above Gamba was another favourite, largely because of the picture of a ballerina, but also because the lettering was so very distinctive. I always liked the huge and highly colourful harlequin suspended above the Parmigiani delicatessen, where my father had his shop. All these signs were welcome landmarks for me, telling me I was close to home in Old Compton Street. L’Escargot, the restaurant in Greek Street had a painted hanging sign outside of a man riding a snail. I loved it, because he looked so jolly and happy. Of course, the designers and craftsmen who created these, and many other, icons of my childhood were anonymous, which makes it all the sadder when their work disappears along with the shops that they adorned.
* * *
When you are young – and especially when you were young in the decades before cars widened everyone’s horizons – the local shops define who you are, become part of your identity. In Soho, they gave you a sense of rich possibility, of a much wider world, full of dreams and promises. Alberto Camisa summed it up best: ‘You could get absolutely everything you needed without crossing Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road or Oxford Street: the candlestick maker, butcher, wig maker, everyone was there. There was a car showroom in Poland Street garage – Ford. The rich and the poor all came in together. There was a violin factory in Beak Street, and people who made gold braid for the army uniforms. Every trade had its corner, making and selling everything you can think of. I can’t think of a trade that wasn’t present in Soho. Except funeral directors. Soho was more for the living!’*
*Die-sinkers make dies for striking coins, medals and the like.
†A mantle is the sleeveless coat that is the basis of many garments.
*The only funeral director in the West End was in Holborn, with a branch office in Covent Garden, not Soho.
8
Street People
Although – or perhaps because – there was far less traffic, the streets of the West End were rarely empty by night or day. As well as the crowds bustling their way from one place to another, there were people who made their living, and sometimes lived their lives, on the streets. Some relied on their talents (which could be vanishingly small) to earn a crust, others conducted retail businesses on the pavements – with or without a licence – while others relied on their wits, scamming and hustling passers-by to survive. Soho’s streets,* it seemed, had more than its share of all of them, adding to the unique atmosphere of the place.
There were a lot of buskers on the streets after the war. Some of them had worked in music halls before they joined the forces, and found work hard to come by once they were back on Civvy Street. Others were displaced persons, unable or unwilling to return to their old, pre-war lives, who were trying to scratch a living while they thought about what to do next. They turned up in town centres all over the country, grinding out tunes on squeeze-boxes, washboards, spoons, fiddles or trumpets. Many wound up in London’s West End, where there were so many cinema and theatre queues to entertain.
A relatively common sight in those days was a one-man band, with splash cymbals tied to the inside of his knees, a drum strapped to his back and drumsticks attached to his elbows to enable a steady thumping rhythm while his hands were occupied with a guitar or banjo and his mouth with a wind instrument – a harmonica or a tin whistle – attached to a neck harness. It was a logistical challenge to see just how many instruments they could festoon themselves with and what tune they could play that would incorporate at least a bar or two from all of them. The clatter made by one-man bands as they moved from one pitch to another had to be heard to be believed. There was no mistaking one on the move.
Late on a Sunday morning, the scratchy, tinny opening bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby’ would announce the arrival of my favourite buskers in Old Compton Street. I believe they were called the Sons of the Desert, and if they weren’t, then they should have been, on account of their fezzes. It’s only now, thinking back, that I realize the probable significance of those bright splashes of red that looked for all the world like upturned flowerpots, each with a single, natty black tassel. Before the Second World War, everyone wore a hat as a matter of course. Indeed, few would step out of their own front doors without their ‘titfer’: it simply wasn’t done. Men could choose between the cheesecutter (or flat cap), the trilby, the Homburg, the fedora or the bowler for day-to-day wear and in summer, the Panama or a straw boater. Their choice of headgear spoke volumes as to their class, occupation and aspirations. Although the subtle nuances of headgear and class have now been lost, in the late forties and fifties they were still instantly recognized by any British man, woman or child in the street.
A fez said kasbah, Araby, Egypt, the mysterious East and the desert. My favourite buskers were boxing clever; their startling headgear told passing prospective punters that they had fought and suffered alongside Monty in his North African campaigns. A fez proclaimed that its wearer was a seasoned ‘Desert Rat’ – even if he wasn’t – and the punters would approve, either because they’d been there, too, or had a son, a brother, a husband, a lover or a pal who had: this helped to loosen passers-by’s grip on their small change.
A bright red fez also showed up well in the dim light of winter, or on a foggy day. It was exotic, and a spot of exoticism never went amiss when a body was trying to flog something that people didn’t actually need, especially when times were hard and money short. People craved distraction from rationing, the atom bomb, poverty and the ‘make do and mend’ culture that had dominated their lives for so long. The Sons of the Desert provided all that with their street-level entertainment.
To my, admittedly unsophisticated, five-year-old eyes, they were wonderful, it was as simple as that. The music issued from the flaring horn of the old-fashioned (even then) hand-cranked gramophone that played the brittle, shellac 78s of the day. The needle that ran in the record’s grooves was enormous, big enough to darn fishermen’s socks. The precious gramophone had its own transport, in the form of a battered, black, well-sprung perambulator, which was pushed from pitch to pitch by one of the troupe. Sometimes there were seven of them, and occasionally as many as eleven. As well as their fezzes, the buskers wore ‘penguin suits’, a kind of evening dress featuring a long tailcoat and pinstriped trousers.
Their act was a combination of acrobatics, silent comedy routines, and a sand dance – performed on genuine sand transported in an old fire bucket that hung from the pram handle. They kept all sorts of other props in the pram besides the gramophone, including ancient Egyptian headgear to complement what they fondly imagined to be the ancient Egyptian moves of the sand dance. They moved their heads backwards and forwards in time to the music in exactly the same way as amorous pigeons moved theirs as they strutted their stuff on our windowsill. Even today, I can’t see pigeons moving that way without thinking of the Sons of the Desert and their sand dance.
The grand finale was always a human pyramid. At the very end of the show, the acrobats would tumble, in turn, starting from the very apex of the pyramid down to the ground, and finish off with a neat roll or a somersault. They never, ever, crashed in to their audience
, however close or pressing it was. They never lost a fez either, even when they were upside down. I always wondered how they did that. My brother said they nailed them to their heads and I really believed him because, being four years older, he knew everything. Now that age has brought a little more wisdom, I reckon they must have had some sort of sticky tape.
‘Meg of the Gleaming Gums’ was a name I coined for a small, round woman in a headscarf and ancient winter coat who sang badly, but operatically – in a fruity soprano – to queues in Leicester Square and Piccadilly. Others I spoke to remember her being able to hit all the notes, but not necessarily in the right order. The reflection of the famous Piccadilly Circus lights would flash on and off her toothless gums as she warbled her way through ‘We’ll Meet Again’ and ‘Danny Boy’.
Sometimes Meg was accompanied by Jumping Jack, a tall, lugubrious man with grizzled locks and long, skinny arms and legs. He wore an ill-fitting harlequin suit with diamond-shaped splashes of red, blue, yellow, green and white, and would caper about, dancing, wearing a mournful look and holding out a hat in his hand. He was Meg’s ‘bottler’, the collector of the all-important lolly.
Not all buskers were musicians or dancers. I remember an escapologist who often ‘did’ the West End. He also turned up at the Tower of London, once trippers had re-established their well-worn sightseeing trails. He had a sidekick who would fasten his hefty chains with huge padlocks, tie the neck of his sack with rope, or shutter and bar a cage contraption and then start the dramatic countdown to the performer’s marvellous escape.
On busy street corners in the shopping streets stood men who twisted long, sausage-shaped balloons into various animals. Although they flogged the results of their efforts, their schtick was really the making of their colourful menageries. Their hands were so deft and quick that they were almost a blur. They prided themselves on being able to make any animal that their audiences requested. Although I remember well the tortured squealing of the balloons as their hands twisted them into shape, I never remember one bursting, which was what their audiences were often waiting for. As I was afraid of sudden bangs, I watched them work with my fingers in my ears, just in case. When they had done, the results of their efforts were either sold on the spot or tied with string to float in the wind above their heads like a weird, weightless, airborne zoo.
Street vendors sold an amazing variety of things. I remember a lot of injured war veterans selling stuff from trays slung around their necks. It was not unusual to see a facially disfigured man, someone missing a limb, or a blind man, flogging boxes of matches or packets of razor blades or ballpoint pens. These were the most popular lines, and may well have been supplied by a veterans’ charity. They were always sold by men, presumably because women were not usually combatants in the Second World War and thus were not eligible to be licensed as street vendors or to be supplied with goods to sell.
Women did, however, sell flowers on the streets, and sometimes fruit. The flower ‘girls’ of Covent Garden, some of whom were quite elderly women, would pick up what was left unsold at the market in the late morning, bunch it up and hawk it on the streets, especially to the theatre and cinema crowds in the evening.
The wonderful aroma of roasting chestnuts was a familiar one during winter months of the late forties, fifties and even in to the sixties. On bitter days, the hapless vendor would often find himself surrounded by a small mob warming their frozen hands and legs near his glowing brazier. Often, feelings of embarrassment for copping a swift, free warm-up led to the purchase of a newspaper cone of hot chestnuts, so the vendors only really minded if the crowd got so dense that fresh customers were kept away. Then a few choice, often witty words would send the heat-scroungers scurrying, only for them to be replaced by more frozen shoppers.
For years and years, chestnut sellers disappeared from London’s streets and they were sorely missed by those who remembered the wonderful smell, the distinctive taste and, of course, the free heat. However, I’ve noticed that one or two have reappeared around Christmas, as a nod to nostalgia and in response to popular demand. There’s nothing quite like the smell of hot chestnuts wafting around shoppers as they schlep wearily from shop to shop, to bring a glow of festive feeling back in to the commercial Christmas chore.
In Leicester Square there was a stall that sold glass animals, run by a man known, appropriately enough, as ‘Harry the Glass’, although he also answered to Harry Murphy. He made the animals as well, and was a fully paid up member of the Magic Circle. He was, apparently, a very good magician when he was sober, but sadly, he drank like a fish. His favoured form of transport was a black cab that he drove himself in those days before the breathalyser. There were several other glass-animal sellers in the West End. One, called Reg, had an oxygen cylinder by his pitch and would make the animals on the street – which brought in more customers, naturally.
For a long time after St Anne’s Church fell victim to the Blitz, so all that was left was its tower and churchyard, the site of the missing church was a car park. There was also a bookstall there, run by a man who sold second-hand whodunnits, romances and the like from the top of his stall and kept dirty books for his more ‘discerning’ customers underneath. I know this because I’m pretty sure that my father, among others, supplied him with them.
An army of fly-pitching spivs toted suitcases from pitch to pitch in the post-war decades. They would rest their suitcases on a couple of upended wooden beer crates and open them with a flourish to display packets of nylon stockings, or gloves and scarves, or knickers, or men’s socks, or battery-operated toys with flashing eyes and jerky movements, or tea towels, or bottles of perfume – the list went on and on. They’d usually have a lookout posted with his eyes skinned for a policeman’s helmet approaching among the crowds. If a bobby hove in to view, a whistle so piercing that it could slice through the sound of the bustling crowds, bus gears grinding and lorries rattling, would alert the salesman, who would slam down the lid of his case and scarper, mid-spiel sometimes, and take a turn or two round the block, or nip in for a cuppa somewhere. When the coast was clear, it was back to the same pitch and the lookout on the same corner. They must have made a living for at least two.
Buying from a spiv with a suitcase was fraught with pitfalls. Sometimes a packet of nylons would consist of just one stocking, or a mismatched pair with one long enough to fit a giraffe and the other little more than a sock. The ‘French’ perfume could turn out to smell like drains or lavatory cleaner, having been knocked up in somebody’s bath out of God knows what. The spivs relied on the anonymity of the streets to get away with it.
Alongside the vendors, there were sharks. Many specialized in the three card trick, also known as ‘Find the Lady’ or ‘Three Card Monte’. The trickster would set up shop on a crate and place three cards face up. One was a queen: often, but not always, the psychologically more attractive queen of hearts. Once the trickster had allowed prospective punters a good look he’d turn the cards face down. Then he would move the cards around so rapidly that onlookers would be too confused to keep track.
One of his stooges would take a punt, while at least one other kept an eagle eye out for the police. The stooge who was betting would place a sum of money on the beer crate, apparently confident that he could ‘find the lady’. Naturally, he would have no problem because he and his partner had pre-arranged the ‘lady’s’ whereabouts. The stooge would carry on ‘winning’ for a bit and once he had drawn in a crowd with his glad cries of triumph and joy, his performance would encourage the more naïve in the crowd to have a go. This time, however, the trickster would palm the queen, thus leaving the punter no chance of winning.
A variation on this trick was ‘Find the Pea’ or ‘Find the Ball’. Instead of cards, the trickster would pull the same stunt using a dried pea and three walnut shells or, for the more organized, a small ball and three plastic cups. But no matter what the props, the schtick was exactly the same.
Another classic scam was ‘Take a
Pick’. Eager punters would shell out a few bob to pull a straw from a cup. If the straw had a ‘winning’ number on it they’d win a small prize, worth a tiny fraction of their original stake. The notorious Jack Spot used to boast of making £50 or more a day at this scam as early as the twenties, when he charged just sixpence a punt. The sum Spot made amounted to a small fortune in those days. I assume that the profits made in the forties and fifties were even greater.
There never seemed to be any shortage of mugs to take on the sharks, even when the scam was obvious. ‘There was a guy outside Foyles,’ remembers Graham Jackson. ‘He used to have a box and little envelopes. And he’d put them all in a box, and one of them contained – I think it must have been a pound note. And what he’d do, he’d shuffle them all up, and – the same old trick – he said, “Right, pick one.” And one of his blokes, of course, would go up, and take it – “Oh, you’ve won a pound, mate. Well done.” It was like half a crown a go, and these mugs would pay half a crown, and the bloke’s got it in his hand, he’s got the winning packet in his hand.’
Historically, the West End has always had a soft spot for misfits, characters and wild eccentrics, showing an easygoing acceptance, and sometimes a real affection, for the many weird and wonderful types who would not be tolerated elsewhere. Being partisan, I’d say that this is particularly true of Soho, but that could be because Soho welcomed my peculiar little family when the housing estates of suburbia had shunned us as pariahs, cursed with a virulent form of leprosy.
It is hard to understand now, in more enlightened times, just how judgmental, class-ridden and conventional post-war Britain was and just how difficult it was for people whose faces simply did not fit. Many of these West End characters would end up at the Nucleus, Gary Winkler’s all night coffee bar, which stayed open until around six in the morning. A place that served hot food, cooked by someone who gloried in the name of ‘Denis the Menace’ or, more sinisterly for a cook, ‘Dirty Dennis’, the Nucleus was a godsend to musicians and actors who needed somewhere to come down from an evening performance. Insomniacs and those poor souls who slept rough were also grateful to have somewhere warm and dry to sit over a coffee or a plate of spaghetti bolognese, especially on cold, wet nights.