Up West

by Pip Granger

  Mike O’Rouke also remembers having to make the rounds. ‘I used to do the shopping for my mum when I was old enough, using ration books. She used to tear out a little coupon, give it to me and send me to the Home & Colonial and other shops up on the Dials. She just used to point me in a direction and say, “Here’s a coupon, go up there and get that.”’

  Sonia Boulter’s family were registered with Hammet’s, near the Rupert Street end of Berwick Street market. This was a provisions shop that met most needs. ‘It was a grocer’s, butcher’s, everything, and I can remember going in there with my mum, and having the ration book, and having to tick it off for butter, or bacon – everything you bought you had to tick it off. Not far from Hammet’s was the Home & Colonial, and Mum would tell us to go and get a carton of broken eggs, because broken ones were off-ration. It was a treat to have eggs.’

  The deep joy of any foodstuff off-ration in those hard, hard times cannot be overestimated, as Barbara Jones recalls. ‘In Great Queen Street, off Drury Lane, where the Connaught Rooms are, there was a shop called Jack’s. You’d go down two steps in to this shop and buy a sherbet to eat with your fingers, and sometimes they used to have little lumpy, gnarly end bits of chocolate-coated toffee. We used to go in and say, “Got any sweets off the ration?” In fact, you’d go in to any shop and ask for goods off the ration.’

  Cooked food bought from a shop or in a restaurant was off-ration, so pie and mash or fish and chips not only provided nourishment, but also preserved precious coupons. As an added bonus, there was probably less queuing involved and no cooking or washing up to be done.

  Making a meat pie at home would involve queuing at the butcher’s for meat and lard, and probably another queue at the grocer’s for the flour to mix with the lard for the pastry: and there was no guarantee that there’d actually be any lard, flour or meat when you finally made it to the counter. It could literally take days to assemble the ingredients for a meal, and it would also take several people’s rations or weeks of hoarded coupons.

  No wonder so many opted for pie and mash from a shop or market stall or cod and threepenn’orth from the local fish and chip shop. Most people ate their fish supper straight from the newspaper it was wrapped in. There is still a school of thought that says it tasted better that way.

  Another way to eat off-ration was to seek out unusual food – easier done in the cosmopolitan West End than most places in Britain. Sonia Boulter remembers a very special treat: ‘Near the Bar Italia was a shop that sold just horsemeat. You’d go in there – or Mum would send us in, because they used to like children – and get a couple of steaks. And I remember seeing half-horses hanging up. I didn’t think anything of it. I used to love horsemeat: I wouldn’t dream of touching it now. It was lovely in those days, when you didn’t have any meat, it was brilliant. It was either that or no meat.’

  ‘Sometimes, when Mum couldn’t afford anything else, we’d have a soup made of milk, rice and peas, and that was a meal. Milk, because it was good for you, rice, because you got plenty of it, and peas because it was vegetables.’

  Vegetables were never on ration, but of course supplies of many of them, and most fruit, dried up completely in the war. Many took a while to return, especially fruit, and what there was was often too expensive for working families – which is why the newly formed NHS started doling out orange juice for children. Shortages were less marked in the West End; most of the fruit and veg in England passed through Covent Garden market, and the local retailers – provided they got up early enough – could have their pick.

  Very, very few ordinary families would have owned a refrigerator in the fifties. This meant that food shopping had to be done on pretty much a daily basis – certainly for such perishables as milk, fish and meat – and generally within a few streets of home. As there were very few cars, anyone who went far afield to shop had to bear in mind that they would have to schlep it home afterwards on the bus or on foot. And once they’d walked it to the street door, they often had to heave it up several flights of stairs. There were sixty-six steps to our flat, and this was no joke with several bulging bags of shopping about one’s person.

  My memories of shopping for food, and those of most of the people I spoke with, revolved around the wonderful Berwick Street market, the vibrant heart of Soho, which has been weighing out produce to local people, and local businesses, for more than three hundred years. Although some local restaurants got their supplies directly from Covent Garden, most of them were supplied by the market. ‘There was no ceremony about it,’ Alberto Camisa recalled. ‘They would come down and leave orders for the next day, ten sacks of potatoes or whatever, and the stallholders would go and buy it at the Garden next morning.’

  A market is a place of wonder for children. Its many sights, colours, sounds, smells, tastes and textures make an impression that lingers for a lifetime. Many of the people I spoke to still remember their trips to Berwick Street market with their mum as an event, even if the market was on their doorstep and the trips were frequent. And when they were old enough to go on their own, there was so much activity, so much life that they just could not be bored. Owen Gardner put it best: ‘That was a fascinating place. Everybody went there. Everybody knew everybody. It was Soho.’

  Of all the people I spoke to, no one knew, or loved, Berwick Street market quite as well as Alberto Camisa, who grew up in the centre of it, in the house above his family’s famous delicatessen, Fratelli Camisa. ‘Berwick Street market was all food all the way from Broadwick Street through the alleyway and in to Rupert Street down to Shaftesbury Avenue. You couldn’t get a pitch: it was packed with stalls, there was no room between. All the stalls had lots of lights on in those days, tilley lamps, lanterns, and the stalls had canopies – dark green canopies, dark blue canvases, or awnings – over the stalls. They all looked nice, made quite a picture. It was a great community; hectic, noisy, very friendly. Obviously, there were family rivalries, particularly between stallholders, pitches and stalls and so on: there were basically three or four families, cousins and that, ran the market. Some were from Soho, others from the East End.’

  Sonia Boulter confirms this. ‘At one stage, all the barrow boys down there, they were all connected, the brother of this one was the uncle of that one. It was very family-orientated down there. We knew a lot of the barrow boys by name and could have a chat. All it was when I was a kid was fruit and veg, and in those days it had the name of the best fruit and veg market in London.’ Sonia’s friend, Maria Mechele, actually lived in Berwick Street, and was the cousin of many of the stallholders there.

  Many of the stallholders specialized. There was a potato stall, a stall that sold only spinach and cauliflowers, a banana man, and so on.

  ‘I had the dubious distinction of being the youngest barrow boy in Berwick Street market, twelve years of age, selling nothing but lemons on behalf of my employer, who had the stall next to mine,’ Andrew Panayiotes told me. ‘You could hear my call to all the prospective punters throughout Berwick Street. “C’mon girls, get your lemons here. Five for a bob.”’

  Alberto Camisa also remembered how ‘The stallholders’ kids used to come out on a Saturday, and help them out with their packing, summer and winter.’ The stalls and barrows were packed away overnight – and all through Sunday – on bomb sites and lock-ups all round Soho, little courtyards reached through alleyways between buildings. Previously, they had served as stables and carriage-houses, but now they generally housed the costermongers’ wheelbarrows. They were locked away every night and pulled out early in the morning. ‘The market traders had big heavy wooden wheelbarrows with steel-rimmed wheels,’ Alberto told me. ‘I remember hearing them rumbling about around five, six o’clock.’

  A stallholder’s day began even earlier than that, before the first sparrow had coughed. ‘I had to be at Covent Garden at four in the morning and bring back produce that would not fit on the truck, piled high on a two-wheeled barrow,’ Andy Pullinger recalls. ‘It weighed a ton, an
d if I wasn’t careful, it would fall to the back and I had a hell of a job to bring it back up again.’

  Andy had started working in the market in 1957, when he was still a schoolboy. ‘The first job was when school had finished for the day. I had to put the barrows away at night after the market was closed. They were stored in a bomb site, the entrance of which was the next street over. After a while, I graduated to working Saturdays and holidays on the fruit and veg stalls. The first couple I worked for were called Gertie and Sid Hamburger. Next I worked for Sid’s brother Johnny, who was a bit of a joker. He once sent me to the chemist’s for a bottle of “maid’s milk”. It took a while to figure out why the sales lady looked at me that way.

  ‘My third job was for Johnny Benson: he was quite the man with the women. On Saturday mornings he had a stall on Church Street, so I looked after his stall in Berwick market on Saturdays. Opposite was a barber shop where I had my hair done every Saturday in preparation for the night out. The barber never failed to ask if I needed “Anything for the weekend?” Next to the barber was a fish and chip shop, and in front of that was Arnold the Tie Man. As the name implies, his stall sold only ties. I don’t think he would make much of a living today.

  ‘It was fun being my own boss for the day. After the bomb sites had been cleared, they built a pub right behind the stall. I was never thirsty, and usually finished the day giving the fruit and veg to customers. At day’s end I would take the takings to Johnny at Edgware Road. He was usually quite happy with what I did.’

  Throughout the fifties, the market was all frenetic bustle – on six days a week, at least. Raye Du-Val, who lived nearer the Oxford Street end of Berwick Street, remembers Sunday afternoons being ‘weird, because you’d be looking out of your flat, looking along to where the market would be, and it’s all empty, everyone’s gone down Brighton, somewhere like that.’

  ‘Sunday was very different, no market, not much traffic,’ Alberto Camisa’s brother, Francesco recalls. ‘Sunday was the only time you could have a lie-in. The only thing that used to disturb us was the Salvation Army band playing on the corner of Berwick Street and Peter Street at about nine in the morning.’

  It wasn’t just the stalls that drew people to Berwick Street market; the surrounding shops were full of staples and specialized foods. Andy Pullinger told me that his first memory of Soho ‘was going shopping in Brewer Street with my mum, and seeing all the produce hanging in the windows of the butcher’s, fish in barrels at the fishmonger’s and grocery items laid out in front of the stores.’

  Janet Vance also remembers there being ‘a butcher’s, a baker’s and more in Brewer Street. In Peter Street you had a Jewish kosher shop, Jolson’s, and a Jewish boot mender’s – Brahms they were called – and then there was the smoked salmon shop in Brewer Street that sold the big gherkins and rollmops and things. And Grodzinski’s the bakers were there. You had the Greek shops selling their sort of stuff. The shops had their own stalls outside.

  ‘Rupert Street was classed as the posh end of the market, more expensive. Rupert Street had Hammet’s. Berwick Street was cheaper. The well-known fruit and veg place was Habgood’s; they had their shop and they had their stall outside, selling the same sort of thing.’

  For Tricia Bryan and her mum, who lived at Tavistock Square, it was a fair haul to Berwick Street, but they made it anyway. ‘It was basically fruit and veg,’ remembers Tricia, ‘then, as we got more sophisticated and started eating Italian food and things, we went to the delis there.’ The delis helped to give Berwick Street its unique flavour, its raffish, cosmopolitan air. Fifis – the French working girls – referred to it as the marché Français, a welcome home away from home for girls who often must have felt lonely and isolated as they walked alien streets.

  While Sohoites remained faithful to Berwick Street and would never have thought of ‘playing away’ at another food market, there was another option for Covent Gardeners and Bloomsburyites. Chapel Street market in Islington wasn’t exactly local, but it was easy to get to, as Ann Lee points out: ‘We used to go on the tram from Kingsway, right up Pentonville Hill to Chapel market. We’d go and pick up fruit and veg and what have you, and get the tram back home. Where we were in Drury Lane, you had the choice: jump on a bus or tram from Kingsway to Chapel Street market, or walk to Berwick Street.’

  The two markets had contrasting characters. Perhaps a little larger than Berwick Street, Chapel market was more of a general market. It had a strong East End character to it, with shops selling the cockney delicacies of jellied eels and pie and mash. For some, the latter were a deciding factor in persuading them to take the tram. ‘Chapel Street, that was my mum’s favourite,’ Mike O’Rouke remembers, ‘because they had a couple of pie and mash shops up there, and that was me mum’s favourite.’

  Some people didn’t bother with going to the market at all. Peter Jenkins’s mother ‘never went to Berwick Street’, although she sometimes sent him to Covent Garden after school, when the wholesalers were closing down, to see if they were prepared to sell something off. ‘All the other food shopping was done on Drury Lane. There were some very good old grocery shops there.’

  Another family drawn to Drury Lane was the Jacksons, who lived in Covent Garden until 1941, when they were bombed out to Bloomsbury. Their old stomping ground in Drury Lane drew them back, however – even Graham, who was born after they moved. ‘Drury Lane was its own little village, wasn’t it? There was everything there,’ he remembers. ‘There was the oil shop, where we used to take the accumulator in to get charged, for the radio. We used to walk from Ridgmount Mansions all the way down to Drury Lane, carrying it. There must have been somewhere else we could have taken it, but we always seemed to take it there.’

  His older sister, Olga, agreed. ‘We used to put in the mileage. It was habit. We was born and brought up round there, and used to go back. You had the first Sainsbury’s in Drury Lane. The very first one.’

  John Sainsbury and his wife, the daughter of a dairyman, opened a small grocery store at 173 Drury Lane, a house with three floors and an attic, in 1869. After their initial success, John Sainsbury planned to establish a small chain of stores, one each for his six sons to manage. It’s all a far cry from today’s chain of supermarkets.* I have always suspected that Mrs Sainsbury’s family was Welsh: the great majority of the dairies in the West End were run by Welsh men and women, so much so that even those with English proprietors were referred to as ‘Welsh dairies’. This may have had something to do with Sainsbury’s specializing in butter, cheese and dairy products for much of their history.

  The Jacksons were registered for dairy rations with Sainsbury’s in Drury Lane. Olga remembers ‘the cheese, and the butter that they used to pat and pack themselves, and the big high chairs that you’d sit on while they did it’. Butter pats – wooden paddle-like things with carved surfaces used to shape and brand the butter – came in all sorts of wonderful designs. One paddle might have a design of wavy lines and the other would have a picture of a cow or something: it could be a thistle, or buttercups, it varied from dairy to dairy. Butter was stored in large ceramic bowls, often decorated with a blue and white pastoral design involving cows. The grocer cut a lump out of the butter and weighed it. Next, the paddles were used to pat the lump into shape, taking great care to centre the design properly: dairies were proud of their product. Once the butter pat was made, it was wrapped in greaseproof paper and tied with string to keep the flaps closed.

  Most of the food shops in the West End were small and specialized, although there were exceptions, such as Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, the more modest Hammet’s, and the Civil Service Stores in the Strand, which had a food hall on its ground floor. These shops were nothing like modern supermarkets: they were more like food department stores – or, in the case of the rather grand Fortnum’s, a food emporium. Pepe Rush remembers Hammet’s ‘as like a modern supermarket, but old-fashioned’, with what were effectively separate shops in the same building.

&nb
sp; The normal practice, however, was for the butcher, the grocer, the baker, the dairyman, the greengrocer, the cheesemonger and the fishmonger to have their own specialist premises. I have vivid memories of some of these lovely small shops around Soho: a butcher with lots of game hanging from steel hooks, both inside and outside; drool-inducing displays on glass trays in the windows of fragrant pâtisseries; and particularly, the exotic and exciting delicatessens, festooned with hams and salamis, infused with the scents of coffee, garlic, vanilla, chocolate and dried mushrooms, and humming with activity in a variety of languages – Italian, French, Yiddish, Greek.

  These wonderful shops were Soho’s pride and joy at a time when meat and two veg – and no seasoning apart from far too much salt and possibly, for the brave, some white pepper – was as adventurous as cuisine got for most people in Britain. There were so many delicatessens in Soho – over fifty, according to Alberto Camisa – that expatriates could find just about anything they might want from the ‘old country’, no matter which one it was.

  ‘Where we were in Berwick Street,’ Alberto explained, ‘there was a Jewish delicatessen immediately to our right, a butcher’s shop next to him. In Peter Street, there were three Jewish delis and a big fish and chip shop. In Old Compton Street there were ten or twelve – a French delicatessen, three Parmigiani shops, Demonises, the Lena Stores – and everybody knew everybody’s prices. If someone came in for a chorizo, we’d say, Go to Ortega – that was another one in Old Compton Street – They have it at two and sixpence a pound. And if Ortega had someone wanting Parma ham, they’d send them round to us. It was like an open-air department store.’