Up West

by Pip Granger

  To some extent, John’s ‘lost weekends’ followed a family tradition. He tells me that his Uncle Primo used to tour the world as a wrestler after the Second World War. ‘One of the stops was always England, and he’d always stay in London at the Regent’s Palace Hotel or the Strand Palace Hotel. He used to come and see us once a year, every year, in Soho. My mother used to hate it: her head would go in her hands and she’d start crying when she heard he was arriving. My uncle was very strong on the drink, so he’d take my dad out and we wouldn’t see him for two or three days. By the time my dad came back, he looked about ten years older, ’cause my uncle was a fearsome drinker. He used to take my dad out on the piss for a couple of days on the spin, and my mum knew she’d have to pick up the pieces when he got back.’

  Although, as Alberto Camisa pointed out, the great majority of the residents rarely frequented drinking clubs, strip clubs or nightclubs, pubs were a different matter. There were plenty of street-corner pubs in the West End, more than there are now. Some of the local hostelries catered mainly for the theatre crowd, gay men or other visitors, but there were others, tucked away in side streets or on street corners, that the residents could more or less call their own ‘We used to go to the Mercer’s Arms, next door,’ Mike O’Rouke remembers. ‘Everyone knew everyone in there. It was like the Rovers in Coronation Street. We used to play darts and that. It was very much a local: you used to get a few of the stars from the Cambridge Theatre go in there, but mostly it was people from the surrounding streets.’

  ‘My father was a great pub man,’ remembers Owen Gardner. ‘He went to the pub next door, the Cranbourn. My mother knew that as soon as he said he was going next door for a drink, she wouldn’t see him again until closing time. He didn’t drink a lot, but he was a good conversationalist. He’d go there, and he’d meet people – one regular, Ulrica Forbes, did the drawings of Charles and Anne when they appeared on National Savings stamps when they were children. She was always in there.’

  Ann Lee’s father was a regular, but not frequent, pub-goer. ‘Dad used to go for a drink on a Sunday lunchtime, because he worked six days a week. He’d go up the pub about half-past twelve, and he’d be in at two for his dinner. Sometimes, if the family came down, they’d all go up the pub together. They used to drink in the Prince of Wales.’

  The Prince of Wales was the local not only for the Lee family, but also for the Freemasons at the nearby Masonic hall. Cultural clashes between the Masons and the less inhibited locals occasionally caused problems. ‘I must have been sixteen or seventeen,’ Ann remembers. ‘I used to call in on Nan every morning before I went to work, just to give her a kiss and say, “See you later,” and she said “You’ll never guess what happened to me – but don’t tell your mother. Last night I had a couple of Guinnesses and I was singing, and those bloody Freemasons got me slung out.”

  ‘I was fuming all day, so on the way home from work, I went in to the pub, and said to the landlord, “How dare you?” “What are you talking about?” he said. “How dare you chuck my nan out of this pub that she’s been drinking in for years because of those weirdoes?” I really had a go. “She won’t be drinking in here any more. She don’t need your bloody pub,” I said.

  ‘I told Nan to go to the Sugar Loaf, said they would be all right in there, and she never went to the Prince of Wales again. My mum found out about a year later. She went in the Prince of Wales, and the landlord said, “Cor, your daughter’s a fine mare, ain’t she, coming in here wiping the floor with me?” and my mum said, “What? My Ann? My angel?” So she asked him what it was about, and he told her. She said to me, “How dare you show me up?” and I said, “What do you mean, show you up? You didn’t even know.” Mum really had a go at my nan, though.’

  Like many women of her generation, Cissie Glover was fond of a fortifying bottle of stout or two. ‘At six o’clock,’ remembers Ann, ‘you’d see Nanny go out with her little hat on and her little coat, tripping out the gates and going up the road for her Guinness. Because she’d lived there so long, people would see her and say, “Hello Ciss, how are you? Have a drink, love.” Sometimes on a Sunday – not evening time – after people had been buying her drinks, she’d walk in to the gate of the flats and all of a sudden you’d hear her singing “Knees up Mother Brown”, and then she’d shout out, “Kitteee!” and my mother would say to me, “Oh my gawd. Get down those stairs quick and get her indoors.” So I had to run down the stairs and say, “Come on, Nan, let’s get inside.” I had to sing “Knees up Mother Brown” with her all the way across the grounds to get her indoors, otherwise she wouldn’t move.

  ‘In the end, my mum used to tell people, “If you see my mum, don’t give her a drink. I don’t want you to be horrible to her, but she’s getting on, she can’t take it.” She was harmless, though. It was only because Mum would get embarrassed ’cause she used to sing at the top of her voice.’

  As in any other working class district of London, Sohoites and Covent Gardeners knew how to organize a knees-up, and the Coronation in June 1953 provided a splendid excuse for a party or several. Mike O’Rouke went to a street party in Betterton Street, between Endell Street and Drury Lane. ‘I remember we had quite a big party at home, too. My dad painted the outside of the house, decorated it up a bit, and we put some photos indoors, pictures of the Queen in the window.’

  The large estates had their own outdoor parties, as Ann Lee remembers. ‘They laid on a spread in the grounds at Wild Street, big tables and chairs, they put up a stage, there was all these benches with trestle tables. You had clowns and

  . . . there was so much excitement, and we had all these fancy cakes. We were all at this fantastic big party, all our mums were there with hats on, and our dads. Well, my dad wasn’t there, because he was an unsociable sod. He probably said “Good evening”, and went upstairs. He was a lovely man, but it was “Mornin’”, or “Afternoon”, and that was it.’

  Peter Jenkins went to the same party. ‘I remember my mother coming in that morning and telling me that they’d climbed Everest. That was announced on the morning of the Coronation. That was incredible. Then the whole day was built around the Coronation. There was an enormous street party – an estate party! – and I won first prize in the fancy dress. I went as Watney’s wall – Mr Chad – and the prize was presented to me by Mary Martin, who was in South Pacific at the Theatre Royal, I still remember that.’

  Unusually, Peter also remembers the solemn events that preceded the Coronation, and gives an insight in to a lost world. ‘I remember coming home from school, and my mother telling me the King was dead. A great black feeling coming over me. I can’t imagine that registering the same with a seven-, eight-year-old today. When the funeral came, we went to see it on my aunt’s television in Croydon, as we didn’t have one: everybody dressed up – I wore my Cub uniform – and wore black armbands, and stood to attention as the cortège was going along Whitehall.’

  A whole new perspective on the Coronation was provided by Charles Hasler, for whom it was another, very fraught, working day. ‘Don’t talk to me about the Coronation! I was a sergeant at West End Central, and I got put on night duty the night before the Coronation. I had a little squad of police and a bigger squad of military police and within the Mayfair area there were car parks allotted for people with blue tickets, red tickets, and our job was to keep these clear and make sure only authorized people parked in them, and we were to stay there until relieved in the morning. The day shift came out just after six and I went home on my bike and went to bed.

  ‘I had to be back at three in the afternoon for more traffic duties. Of course it peed with rain. The uniform got me through the cordons. And then, when all the processions were over, I had the job, with all my merry men, of going out to control crowds and traffic. There were routes set up to get people in and out. One bloody idiot had produced a map showing a car route going down Lower Regent Street in to Waterloo Place, but what he’d forgotten was that there wasn’t a straight exit in to
the Mall, you had to go down the Duke of York’s steps. We had to redirect all these cars all around Pall Mall, Mall Gardens: in the end we were telling people “Look mate, if you can find a place to get out, take it”, because all these careful arrangements had broken down. So I had a miserable cold night before and an even more miserable evening afterwards in the rain. The only good thing, because of the weather, was that everyone went home early, because we were on a twelve-hour shift. I was happy to go off duty at one in the morning.’

  I was surprised to find how few West Enders actually watched the Coronation procession – which was, after all, happening practically on their doorstep, just a short walk away – in person. Instead, like the rest of the country, they huddled around tiny black and white TV sets in their homes or at a neighbour’s; many of the sets were bought specially for the occasion. This may have been because access was restricted: each school in Westminster was allocated so many places to line the route, and names were drawn out of a hat. Ronnie Mann was one of the lucky – he would say unlucky – ones: ‘My lasting memory of the poxy Coronation is being soaking wet and freezing cold from start to finish. It was a crappy day; it rained. It seems to me it rained for forty days and forty nights, because I had to wear my Cubs uniform, the 12th Westminster – bleeding shorts, black shoes, cap. You had to be there hours and hours before, and take whatever sandwiches you had. Of course, there was nowhere to sit but the kerb, because we was right at the front. I can remember being excited a bit, but mostly I can remember being bored and wet.’

  John Carnera was another who was successful in the lottery, and his memories are happier than Ronnie’s. ‘I think it was six boys and six girls from St Patrick’s School were chosen, and I was one of those. I’ll always remember watching the coach go by from a place on the Embankment, facing the river.’

  For Ronnie, there was a consolation however. ‘The following day, June 3rd, was my eleventh birthday, and it was still raining. My brother Eddie took me to the Dominion or the Paramount up towards Warren Street, and we saw Genevieve and Doctor in the House, a double bill. That was my birthday treat, and I remember that more than the bloody Coronation.’

  For most people in the late forties and early fifties, going to the pictures was the basic night out. Everyone I spoke to had memories of trips to the cinema. People used to flock in to the West End to see first run* or art-house movies.† Paul C was one of them. ‘I used to go to see two or three movies in the West End every Saturday, then go down to the British Airways West London Terminal, and get the Sunday papers on the Saturday evening. This was very daring [laughs]. I had a fondness for all-night cinema. In the sixties, I went to see a whole night of Laurel and Hardy, twenty to thirty shorts, or several B sci-fi films, Bogart films, B gangster films, and the audiences – it reminds me of Thomas Pynchon’s phrase, “the whole sick crew” was in there [laughs]. The snoring started during the first movie. Others were sitting there with flasks, or, like myself, trying to pinch themselves awake at four o’clock in the morning. Movie number 26 comes on. I’m going to see this one through. Whooh, it’s six o’clock. It was a dosshouse, really.’

  For the locals, the West End cinema map was very different, as Olga Jackson remembers. ‘Our entertainment in the evenings, we had three cinemas. There was the Dominion, the Astoria, and the Paramount in Tottenham Court Road, at the Warren Street end.’

  These three cinemas, as Jeff Sloneem remembers, ‘weren’t like a West End cinema, they were the local cinema; and the films changed every week. My mother would say, “Which one should we go to?” and I remember once she just couldn’t decide, so we went to the Dominion first, and then on to the Paramount, so we went twice on the same day.’

  A trip to the pictures was a weekly treat for Mike O’Rouke. ‘My mother used to take me to the pictures a lot when I was a boy, on Tuesday nights, to fit in with my mum’s mum, who lived down in Neal Street. She used to babysit my sister, who’s three years younger than me, so that Mum and me could go to the pictures.’ Mike’s mother chose from one of the three local cinemas, but if there was something specific she wanted to see, there were dozens of others a bus ride away.

  Pat Jones was sometimes grateful for a bit of distance from anywhere people were likely to recognize her: ‘Our mother used to knit all the time, in the pictures, wherever – she didn’t have to look. We went to see Sentimental Journey at the Edgware Road. In those days you queued for the pictures, and normally they took you in different stages, so we had to be split up. Anyway, Mother was sitting a little way away, and her ball of wool rolled away down the slope to the front, and people were moving about and started to get tangled up in it. I was very shy and introverted in those days. I just curled up and wanted to die with embarrassment. Nothing embarrassed my mother.’

  Living in Bedfordbury, Ronnie Mann had a rich selection of local cinemas to choose from. As well as the three already mentioned, there was ‘A little cartoon cinema where St Martin’s School of Art is, the Tatler. The Cameo was a news theatre down opposite Cecil Court. In Agar Street, you had another little cartoon theatre. Then there was the Tivoli, a big cinema in the Strand, and another small cartoon cinema on the left-hand side as you come out of Charing Cross station, and there was one in Piccadilly, a small cartoon cinema. There was always an organ playing at the Tivoli on a Sunday. They used to let you in at four, and you start queuing at about three if it was a good film, like Rebel without a Cause. You had the B film and the main film, but basically we used to get in early and the organ used to play. The Tivoli had a really good organ.’ The Tivoli had, in fact, been built as a music hall in the late 1880s, but through the war and afterwards it was a cinema.

  Saturday morning pictures was a ritual enjoyed by children all over the land and the West Enders were no different. Tricia Bryan recalls that she and her friends, who all lived in Bloomsbury, were quite prepared to travel some distance for their weekly cinematic treat. ‘The Granada on the Euston Road was one place where we went and the Gaumont up by King’s Cross was another.’ The long-suffering Paramount in Tottenham Court Road was regularly filled with hordes of children who hissed, jeered, cheered, laughed, screamed and threw things at the villain of the piece every Saturday without fail. The din was incredible: looking back, my heart bleeds for the usherettes ‘armed with nothing but a torch and a face like a sackful of spanners,’ as one erstwhile young punter recalls.

  The Saturday morning programmes would include cartoons, some vintage comedy shorts – sometimes silent – starring Laurel and Hardy, the Three Stooges, Abbott and Costello, or Charlie Chaplin, and last, but certainly not least, serials. Some cinemas would have as many as three serials on the go at one time, all ending in a weekly cliffhanger to bring the young punters back for more. The idea of having more than one serial (each episode lasted about ten minutes) was to stagger them, so that if one week a serial ended, the children would have to come back the next Saturday to see how the cliffhangers in the others were resolved. Of course, the one that had ended would be replaced with the start of another. The serials, many of them from the thirties and forties, fell in to roughly three categories; westerns, sci-fi and what might loosely be called historical adventures. Favourites included the Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, the Cisco Kid, Roy Rogers, Batman, Jet Morgan, Flash Gordon, Tarzan, Robin Hood, William Tell, Zorro and the Scarlet Pimpernel.

  The news and cartoon cinemas were less riotous. I remember many happy hours spent at the Cameo in Windmill Street. It was my local, and like other local children, I was devoted to the antics of Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse, Road Runner, Bugs Bunny and Pluto. The Cameo was also the cinema of choice for Graham and Olga Jackson. ‘We went every Friday to see news and cartoons,’ remembers Olga, ‘and then we used to go in to Fortes for ice cream and stuff.’

  ‘I would have a milkshake, a hamburger, a knickerbocker glory,’ Graham chimed in. ‘Could never eat it all.’

  Pat Jones went to the Cameo in Charing Cross Road opposite the Wyndhams Theatre. ‘It was a
n hour’s cartoons that repeated itself. I liked it so much I would sit there three times round for a shilling.’

  The rolling programmes and cheap admission made the cartoon cinemas a great refuge: sometimes you didn’t even need a shilling. ‘If the weather wasn’t so good,’ remembers Tricia Bryan, ‘we used to go in the Tatler in Charing Cross Road, bunk in through the back door and watch the cartoons two or three times over.’ The back door of the Tatler, in Greek Street, also provided a way in for Janet Vance and her friends. One would pay admission and go and open the door for the others.’

  John Carnera did not let lack of funds stop him from going to the first-run cinemas in Leicester Square either. ‘We’d pay for one to go in, and he’d go round and open the doors, so five or six would get in for the price of one. We’d do that at the Dominion, Leicester Square, the Odeon, the Warner, and of course the Empire. We used to bunk in all of them. It was a dare as much as anything; you know what kids are like.’

  If you could not rustle up enough money to send in a Trojan horse, you had to find a more ingenious method. The ’Bury kids were past masters at this, according to Ronnie Mann: ‘We would bunk in everywhere. When we were kids, and I’m talking about young, we used to go down the side street next to the Astoria, leading to Soho Square. Well, there was a window to the ladies’ lavatory, and I don’t know how high up it was, but as kids it seemed high. One of the iron bars was loose, so a small kid could squeeze through the one that was missing and drop in, down in to the ladies’ lavatory, and then come out, open the push bars, and you’d all go in. We would make a sort of human pyramid, and as I was one of the younger ones, and my older brother was the leader of the local gang, I was always nominated to go in, whether I wanted to or not, and I was petrified.