Up West

by Pip Granger

  Soho has been associated with gourmet and foreign food in one way or another – cooking it and importing it, as well as selling it – since the French arrived in the seventeenth century, and the Italians, Chinese, Greeks, and many others have carried on this tasty tradition ever since. A description in the London Courier in 1955 revelled in the exotic nature of the foodstuffs available. ‘Through the windows of a Soho fishmonger one can see squids and cuttlefish, crayfish, red mullet and eels, and vast sheets of dried cod. The greengrocer sells peppers of every description, artichokes, celeriac, custard apples, avocado pears and about half a dozen different kind of beans. It could not be anywhere else.’ For this writer, continental food shops signify Soho as surely as the ‘huge beer barrel’ of St Anne’s Church clock.

  ‘There is a famous oyster bar in Old Compton Street that is quiet and English,’ the writer continues. ‘There is a roaring Italian café where the waiters sing. You can buy really good croissants and omelettes in this street, and sandwiched between the restaurants are those gigantic Italian grocery stores, bulging with twenty different kinds of enormous cheeses with twenty different smells, and more over the counter. Racks of pasta, straw-coloured bottles of wine, rows and rows of sausage hanging in racks above your head: fat ones, red ones, black ones, white ones, brown ones. Eight different kinds of rice in bins, ten different kinds of sugar.’

  In the fifties, the switch in grocery retailing from the market model – where everything was weighed out and separately bagged in front of you, according to your needs, but you had to wait to be served – to the supermarket model – where everything was pre-packed and priced and you had to wait, in theory, only for other customers’ purchases to be totted up – had only just begun.

  The supermarkets had their fans – they certainly made shopping quicker, once you got used to the new rules – but the shops that leave the most vivid memories are ones from the pre-pre-packed era. Graham Jenkins remembers Law’s, in Drury Lane: ‘All the currants and that used to be in aluminium-lined drawers. They used to tell me, Go on, help yourself. I used to go in there and get a few currants and raisins out of the drawers. Their cheese and all that was on display – you’d get that smell, when you walked in the place, with all that mixture of foods, the dried fruits and that.’

  On the other side of the Strand, Barbara Jones went to Darby’s in Craven Street. ‘It was a general provisions shop, a grocer: they sold beer, and I also got Pepsis there. It was one of those shops with a flap in the counter, and a trapdoor down to the cellar; a real old-fashioned place, with biscuits in tin boxes with a glass lid.’

  Leo Zanelli harbours fond memories of ‘a great big sweet shop in Leicester Square. I remember it vividly because they would always have a giant block of honeycomb and they would chip a lump off for you.’

  Pepe Rush, who lived just down the road from me in Old Compton Street, remembers the shops there very fondly. ‘Pâtisserie Valerie was opposite where I lived, between the newsagent and the Vintage House. The Café Bleu was not far away, and a tobacconist in Frith Street was where my dad got his cigars.’ So did mine. Father smoked big, fat, Romeo and Julietta Cuban ones that smelt wonderful. ‘Pugh’s dairy was round the corner, run by Pugh’s daughter,’ Pepe recalls, ‘and on the corner of Dean Street, first there was an Algerian café or something, and later there was Anello & Davide, where my mum bought her ballet shoes.’

  As well as Pugh’s Welsh Dairy in Frith Street, there was another in Peter Street, in Green Court, with a really memorable feature. ‘I always called it Mrs Cooper’s,’ remembers Janet Vance. ‘It had a cow outside, a cow-sized metal cow. You put your money in a slot, used the tail as a pump, and filled your jug from that.’

  Sonia Boulter remembers Slater, Bisney & Cook, along Brewer Street, for other reasons: ‘It was a very high-class butcher’s. My youngest brother, when he left school, went to work there for a while. Taught me all about meat, you know, the cuts. It was a lovely shop. Lots of tiles, lots of windows, very clean-looking. The counters were always spotless.’

  I am delighted to say that some of these shops still flourish today, West Enders being slower than most to sacrifice quality, choice and taste on the altar of vast profits and bland uniformity. The shopkeepers, in turn, don’t want to let family reputations, gained over generations of hard work, fall apart. And the work was hard. ‘We used to open from half-past eight to six o’clock or half-past,’ remembers Alberto Camisa. ‘At Christmas time we opened from seven until nine or ten at night; we opened Christmas morning. Thursday afternoons we were closed. My parents never went out at night, they were knackered. The shop opened at nine but they were up at half-seven, and it shut at six, but by the time you’d closed up and cleaned up, it was seven thirty.’

  Hard work was a family tradition. Ennio and Isidoro had lost their first business in the war, and had had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, building up their business again from scratch at the shop in Berwick Street. They were helped by having family ties with other shopkeepers, particularly the Parmigianis. The three Parmigiani shops in Old Compton Street were run by cousins. Like the Camisas, they came from Tasorgno, ‘in Parma ham country’.

  There was never any question that Alberto and his brother Francesco would follow in their father’s footsteps, ‘You started working as soon as you started walking. As soon as you could see above the counter, you’d serve. You’d come home from school, finish your homework, if the shop was still open, you went downstairs. On Saturdays, you would help out. Go and get stuff from the cellar, put it on the shelves. We had our little chores. Like most people, we had bare wooden stairs, and we had to wash the stairs once or twice a week with a scrubbing brush.

  ‘Kids always helped out. If their parents had restaurants, they’d help out in the kitchens, wash the dishes, help lay the table. The shop, workshop or restaurant was considered part of your house. Most people lived above it, next door to it, or not far away. It was all family-run, so you helped your dad or mum do the work. It wasn’t slave labour or anything, it was just expected that you would help your parents. When the shop shut, then you could go out and play.

  ‘The shop wasn’t very long, about thirty feet, and sometimes there were seven of us behind the counter and we did not have time for lunch, we were that busy. There would be two people downstairs bringing stuff up from the cellar.’

  Naturally, time brings changes and many shops have disappeared: Fratelli Camisa has long gone from Berwick Street, for example, and the building was demolished in 2008. Some familiar names remain. Pâtisserie Valerie has made people drool for as long as I can remember, the Algerian coffee shop still prides itself on supplying quality coffee beans and teas to a devoted clientele, Lena Stores continues to supply pasta, dried beans and much, much more from its corner of Brewer Street, and there are several others that are still trading. Unlike Covent Garden, Berwick Street market is still there, although the barrows have fallen silent: trucks bring the produce from Nine Elms now. The faces, and the accents, of the costermongers have changed over the years but the cries of, ‘No squeezing ’til it’s yours, missus, surely your mother told you that,’ or something similar can still be heard above the general racket. West End locals still have some of the best food shops in the country in which to forage for their three square meals – and nowadays there are no ration books or coupons to worry about.

  *John Sainsbury died towards the end of the twenties. His last reported words were, ‘Keep the shops well lit.’

  10

  Different but Equal

  ‘Ooh, bona to vada your dolly old eek,’ declaimed the distinctively nasal tones of Kenneth Williams in the justly popular sixties radio programme, Round the Horne. Most listeners could only have guessed what Williams was saying, but of the relative few who actually understood every word, the great majority would have been living, working or playing in London’s West End. Kenneth Williams and his sidekick, Hugh Paddick, always started their sketch with the catchphrase, ‘Hello, I’m J
ulian and this is my friend Sandy,’ and then launched into Polari, the secret language adopted by some, but certainly not all, of Britain’s homosexuals.

  In those profoundly class-ridden days when the population was summarily consigned to ‘top drawer’, ‘middle drawer’ or ‘bottom drawer’, Polari was most popular with working-class gay men. Ordinary seamen (but not officers), dockers in the East End and show people in the West End used Polari extensively in the forties, fifties and sixties. ‘Higher class’ thespians, such as Sir John Gielgud and the bisexual Sir Laurence Olivier, probably rarely, if ever, used it, but ‘chorus boys’, bit part players and stagehands did. Hotels and restaurants boasted quite a large gay population and many of those working in West End establishments were fluent Polari speakers in their off-duty hours. ‘Julian’, his ‘friend Sandy’ and Round the Horne were a much-loved part of Sunday afternoons for a large section of the UK population and it seemed to matter not at all that most listeners didn’t know what on earth the pair were talking about – which is just as well, as often what they were talking about was wildly risqué. How Polari speakers must have loved to have been in on the secret!

  Here’s an example of a Polari exchange.

  Man one: ‘Oh, vada the omee ajax who just trolled in – her in her cod lally-drags. Bona eke, bene corybungas but a fashioned riah if ever I clocked one. She must be on the team.’ (Translation: ‘Look at the man next to us who just walked in, him in his bad trousers. Nice face, good arse, but a wig if ever I saw one. He must be gay.’)

  Man Two: ‘Nanti, nanti ducky, she’s a charpering omee, I’ve seen her down the charpering carsey. Time to scarper and toot sweet.’ (Translation: ‘No, no dear, he’s a policeman, I’ve seen him at the police station. Time to leave and fast.’)

  Polari had its roots as a lingua franca for the travelling peoples of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. Beggars, buskers, pedlars, tinkers (not to be confused with the Romany people, who had their own language), sailors, travelling theatrical troupes, dance troupes, rogues and prostitutes all used Parlyaree, the language that would metamorphose into Polari and become beloved of gay communities. Sailors brought the language to the East End, where it mixed with thieves’ cant, back slang (‘riah’ is back slang for hair, while ‘eke’ is short for ‘ecaf’, back slang for face) and rhyming slang (‘scarper’ is rhyming slang, Scapa Flo – go). Travelling entertainers brought a slightly simpler version to the theatreland of the West End, although as gay sailors and entertainers often mixed when they hit the West End pubs, clubs and gambling joints, the two became virtually interchangeable.

  In the twenties, it became the fashion among homosexuals to refer to men as ‘she’ and they often gave one another women’s names. Quentin Crisp describes days spent with the ‘girls’ in the Black Cat Café in Old Compton Street, ‘buying each other cups of tea, combing one another’s hair and trying on each other’s lipsticks while waiting for something to happen. The fashion continued well into the forties and fifties, especially, but not exclusively, among Polari speakers. Muriel Belcher, the bisexual owner of the famous drinking club, the Colony Room, in Dean Street, always referred to her favourite male customers as her ‘daughters’.

  It is hard to believe in these more enlightened times that a private language was necessary, but in those post-war years homosexual acts were illegal in this country – at least for men. Lesbians were never prosecuted because when the Offences against the Person Act (1861) was followed by section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which outlawed any kind of sexual contact between men in ‘public or private’, legend has it that the enthusiastically heterosexual Queen Victoria point-blank refused to believe that women were capable of such behaviour. The law had, in fact, condemned some gay sexual behaviour for centuries. At one time, the death sentence was imposed for sodomy, while in the period of this book, prosecutions for ‘gross indecency’ could, and did, result in terms of imprisonment for those unlucky enough to be caught and found guilty.

  Even by British standards, post-war attitudes were particularly narrow and judgmental. Why this should be the case is open to interpretation – but it certainly led to increased vigilance by the police and an upsurge in the arrest and prosecution of gay men. According to court records researched by Matt Houlbrook for his book Queer London, the total number of recorded convictions for homosexual acts in the London area in 1937 was 251, and by 1957 that number had almost doubled to 491. Had the record of convictions at Westminster magistrates’ court been available, the 1957 total would have been a good deal larger.

  In his book about his involvement in the famous Lord Montagu court case, Against the Law, Peter Wildeblood contended that class prejudice played a part in his prosecution and that the stiff prison sentences imposed were due to the fact that the men he and Montagu were consorting with were of a lower class, and were thus perceived to present a real threat to society that had to be contained. As he pointed out, ‘The very words of the law are impregnated with emotion on the subject; murder is merely murder, but homosexual acts are “the abominable crime” and “gross indecency”.’ And homosexuality was a crime twice over. As one of my contacts said, not only were there ‘swingeing penalties’ for those found out, but ‘your neighbours and family would castigate you’.

  Class boundaries had been broken down, or at least badly knocked about, in barracks, below decks and in mess halls during wartime, and they threatened to be further undermined during the uneasy peace of the atom bomb years immediately following the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. It became imperative to get our society back on an even, familiar keel in the doomed hope that new fears would dwindle once old certainties had been put in place once again.

  As gay people were consigned to a secretive subculture, it was inevitable that the ‘top drawer’ elite would come in to contact with subjects from the two other, lower, drawers and their many, heavily nuanced subsections that only a born and bred Brit would understand – and the one place where the classes could meet, mingle and mate with enthusiasm was the West End. Leo Zanelli witnessed an incident that illustrated this: ‘I can remember once in Shaftesbury Avenue, there was a crash, a black cab side-swiped a car. I looked up and three sailors got out one side to talk to the cabby, and three gentlemen in evening dress got out the other side and walked straight away. I remember thinking, that’s a bit strange . . .’

  The three gents were far from alone in fancying sailors. Josh Avery, a sailor himself and the subject of Nigel Richardson’s book, Dog Days in Soho, knew that certain ‘posh blokes’ liked consorting with ‘other ranks’, especially one in a sailor’s uniform. Although he was straight himself, Avery thought nothing of exploiting this taste in exchange for a place to stay, endless drinks and some other necessities of life. It was after picking up Dan Farson that he was introduced to the fifties Soho bohemian society that Farson made the subject of his famous book, Soho in the Fifties.

  It’s difficult to convey the depth of the longing that the general population had ‘to get back to normal’ after six years of chaos. In the post-war years, having any kind of ‘airs and graces’, ‘showing yourself up’ or ‘putting yourself forward’ was very definitely frowned upon. Adding flamboyant homosexuality to the mix was several leaps too far. Anyone who has read The Naked Civil Servant, or has seen the erstwhile habitué of the West End, Quentin Crisp, interviewed, will know that then, as now, some gay men were colourfully eccentric. ‘The rumours about homosexuality that were now spread . . . suggested it was a much larger monster than had originally been suspected,’ Crisp wrote, ‘devouring not only all ballet dancers and a few actors but thrusting one claw in at the door of the homes of apparently quite ordinary citizens. The cry went up that England was going to the bitches. The police, to show that they took this prognostication seriously, began to clean up the West End.’

  Nigel Richardson suggests in his book that the defection to the USSR of the Communist campers, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, in 1951 added fuel
to the systemic homophobia of the day, another reason for the continuing crackdown on ‘male vice’ and West End ‘filth spots’. Before they defected, Burgess and Maclean had been enthusiastic members of the Gargoyle Club in Meard Street, and made no secret of being Communist spies when they were in their cups, which was often. However, the devil-may-care, anti-establishment punters at the Gargoyle were unimpressed, and either thought it was some kind of joke, or were too busy drinking, flirting and sleeping with one another to do anything about it. It certainly never occurred to anybody to report the pair to the authorities.

  It was generally believed that homosexuals chose their sexual orientation simply to be different and awkward, and therefore it was possible that they could ‘turn’ straight young men to their wicked, deviant ways. This irrational fear underpinned both the law’s and society’s attitudes to gays. If they could turn our youths ‘queer’, the reasoning went, then conversion to Communism wasn’t out of the question either. It is hard to believe just how frightened the authorities were of Communism in the fifties. In Burgess and Maclean – who were ‘top drawer’ defectors, homosexual and Communist sympathizers – three great bogeys of the day met. The appalled establishment thought that their chaps simply did not behave like that. It must have been because they were ‘queer’; that was the obvious explanation.

  Despite the various amendments to the original Act, it was never actually illegal to be gay: it was simply illegal to do anything about it. Thus gay men were theoretically condemned to a life of loveless, sexless isolation. Those who could face neither chastity nor marriage were forced to go ‘underground’ to seek lovers, companions and friends who, like themselves, understood the relatively few legal highs and the many dreadful lows of being gay in the mid-twentieth century.