Up West

by Pip Granger

  A woman I befriended in the seventies told a similar story. ‘I knew a girl, beaten to death she was, and dumped like a sack of rubbish on a bomb site. Everyone knew she was one of Big Frank’s girls, but nobody said nothing. Well, you couldn’t, could you? I mean, we all thought that Big Frank had done her, or one of his blokes, and nobody wanted to be on the wrong side of them. Not even the police. But then, Big Frank was paying them a bloody fortune to keep their noses out of his business. Everyone knew that.’

  My friend had got out of prostitution by the time I got to know her. ‘I wanted to get out of the game for years before I was able to do it. I felt dirty in the end, you know, sort of rotten on the inside. I was only able to get out when I did because my looks had long gone, and I wasn’t making enough money to suit my bloke. He traded me in for a younger girl in the end, and let me go.’

  Although it’s usual for the girls to regret the life they lived, and most of them have horror stories to tell, literally everybody I talked to who spent their early years in the West End had their own memories of the girls on the streets, and none of them were negative. Some, such as John Carnera, empathized, ‘It was seedy in a way, but yet innocent in many other ways. The girls that I particularly remember were on the corner of Dean Street and Bateman Street. There was a couple there that I knew – I mean, I saw one of them grow old. It was a terrible life. I don’t know how many punters they used to see a day, but you could see them visibly age.’

  Like me, Janet Vance remembers just how glamorous the working girls seemed to us little girls. ‘They were really well dressed, especially the French girls, and they had little French poodles, loads of them, going up and down, especially in Old Compton Street.’ When Janet got older she sometimes took one or other of the girls’ poodles to Hampstead Heath, ‘to give it a run round’. I suppose that the poodles were gentle, uncritical and much-needed companions with uncomplicated requirements that didn’t involve removing any clothing.

  To Sonia Boulter, they were part of the local scene. ‘There were girls everywhere. The regular ones, I knew a few of them by name or face. They were nice. One of them – I seem to remember she was called Fay – you knew straight away she was a prostitute, she looked like a prostitute. She would stand outside of a hairdresser’s in Gerrard Street. She had masses of jet black hair, and she was a bit coarse; she was mouthy, but she was good to us.’

  And to Leo Zanelli, they were people, neighbours. ‘They were quite a happy bunch. Always moaning about being on the game. Never stopped. But always willing to help out. They were some of the nicest people I’ve known, without a shadow of doubt.’

  *The Treaty of Paris in 1814 made Malta part of the British Empire, and a British naval base was stationed there until the thirties. Where there are sailors, there are brothels, prostitutes, pimps and madames. This long association with Britain, her sailors, the incredibly lucrative vice trade and ownership of British passports made the move to London’s West End a natural one for pimps, ponces and those engaged in more legal toil such as waiting tables or shopkeeping.

  16

  Glamour and Sleaze

  Attitudes towards sexuality were incredibly repressive in the forties or fifties, even in to the sixties. A flick through the women’s magazines of the period clearly shows that sexual hypocrisy had remained virtuously intact since the Victorian era: most consenting adults were at it, but few owned up to enjoying it. Women, in particular, were expected to have a very tucked-up attitude to all things sexual. Their job was to breed, but they were not expected, and certainly not encouraged, to like the act of procreation.

  As a result, titillation by photograph, book, film, dance or magazine was much sought after by frustrated men, and Soho’s ‘faces’, well-known characters who lived at the edges of the law, were the very boys to supply it for them. Naturally, it did not cross anybody’s mind to aim pornographic material at women. Even if it had, the men behind the trade wouldn’t have considered producing it. To them, women were wives, mothers, sisters or daughters whose purity could not be impugned, or a commodity to be exploited, not indulged.

  The glamour and sleaze industry – the two were practically synonymous in Soho – was already flourishing in the late forties and early fifties, but was given a tremendous boost by the passing of the Street Offences Act, which revised the Victorian statutes on prostitution and drove the working girls off the streets. Now that it was no longer as easy for men to find a willing girl, the demand increased for other forms of sexual excitement, while the men – and some women – who had been behind organized prostitution turned their attention to other lucrative areas that were either borderline legal – strip clubs and clip joints – or were protected by the corruption of police, such as pornography.

  The new, improved and better organized trade in porn encompassed a multitude of sins, from erotic writing to blatantly pornographic photographs and everything in between. Of course, there had been a thriving trade in nude studies and erotic art long before the camera was invented, but paintings weren’t normally within the reach of your average wallet. Photography changed all that. The dirty postcards beloved of Edwardian roués were often of photos taken in Parisian brothels, and the passing of the Street Offences Act, which drove many working girls to seek alternative sources of income, led to an ever-increasing amount of ever more explicit material coming on to the market. The kind of image that is readily available nowadays in newspapers was considered grossly indecent in the fifties. The antiquated Obscene Publications Act of 1857 meant that it was also highly illegal. Its very illegality is what made it such an attractive proposition to gangsters. Where the law plants its big boots, profit margins are usually enticingly large. Street corner spivs did a lively trade in traditional ‘dirty’ pictures and their more organized criminal brethren dealt with out and out pornography.

  Many of those involved in the porn industry also worked in the club scene, where exotic dancers, striptease artistes and nightclub hostesses plied their various trades. Many of its workers were young women who had come to the West End to pursue their dreams of becoming dancers, singers and actresses but found that there were hundreds of girls lining up for every legitimate, glitzy, showbiz job on offer. Becoming a club hostess or a stripper was as near as they were ever going to get to realizing their rhinestone-studded girlhood ambitions. The criminal element also had business interests in the industry, and the law turned a blind eye while holding its hand out for cash, expensive holidays, suits, watches and cases of black market hooch. ‘Malts’ – Maltese men who had previously had stables of working girls in their thrall – featured large in clubland in the late fifties and early sixties.

  Musician Jack Glicco tells us, in Madness after Midnight, that ‘Girls and drink were the only indispensable items on the club owner’s list of equipment. It was the girls who brought the trade. It was the girls who boosted the sales of drink. It was the girls who, when the night was done, took their chosen clients home.’* To the last of these claims, he should, perhaps, have added a ‘sometimes’. Not all hostesses were ladies of easy virtue, free or purchased. The girls may have promised much, but some did not deliver. Or so Sylvia (not her real name), who was a hostess in the fifties, assures me. While Glicco paints a picture of a voracious bunch of women who were quite prepared to draw one another’s blood to get at the available men who walked in to a club, this was undoubtedly true of some, but not of others.

  Some hostesses actually had a life plan of sorts – ‘to snare a rich husband,’ as Sylvia and Glicco both suggested, or to make a pile as soon as possible in order to fund a respectable trade, such as opening up a florist shop, or owning a seaside boarding-house. Sylvia knew two women who had done just those things. ‘They had their heads screwed on, unlike the rest of us who sort of drifted in to it, with no clear idea what we planned to do once our looks went.’

  It is not surprising that competition between hostesses could be fierce, because the more booze they shifted and the more clients they ent
ertained, the more money they made. Drinks in clubs were always much more expensive than elsewhere. Sometimes they were the real thing. Often, however, the punters spent very large sums on lemonade masquerading as champagne for the hostesses and something known as ‘near-beer’ for themselves. Near-beer may have looked like beer, it may even have tasted a bit like it, but it bore little or no relation to the genuine article. It was a term used to cover a whole range of weird concoctions that were cheap to produce but had little or no alcoholic content. The club owner scored on two fronts: he made a huge profit per drink, and he didn’t wind up with overly troublesome drunks to deal with when they discovered they’d been well and truly fleeced.

  As Sylvia says, ‘It was all a con. Men are so easy to lead, they want to impress you by throwing their money about. All you have to do is turn on the charm, be a bit suggestive, you know, hint they may be lucky if they’re generous, show them some cleavage, indicate that you find them absolutely fascinating, and there you are. It worked very well in the fifties when I was young and beautiful and it is certainly still working to this day. When it comes to feminine wiles, men never seem to learn – thank goodness.’

  Like many others, Sylvia became a hostess virtually by accident. ‘I was stage-struck, and by the time it dawned on me that the stage wasn’t nearly as struck with me, it seemed an easier way to earn my living than spending hours and hours on my feet, day in and day out, selling cosmetics in Selfridges or running about with trays of food in a restaurant. I spent a lot of my time in nightclubs, anyway, and I knew my way around.

  ‘I danced with the men, made conversation, that kind of thing – roughly what I’d been doing all along since I’d been in the West End. The only difference was that before, all I was after was a good time, free drinks and a meal. Sometimes, if the man was really smitten, I’d get some jewellery. Once I was a hostess, I had to charm them in to the frame of mind to buy plenty of drink and to be generous with their tips. That’s where the money came from. If they wanted more than my company, I’d tell them that the manager was strict about the girls mixing socially with customers, and that was that. If they tried to insist, I’d call for help and they’d be thrown out on their ears. Of course, I worked in relatively respectable places. Many of the clubs weren’t like that at all.’

  Some hostesses were basically prostitutes who were allowed, even encouraged, to work from a club. For the women, the attraction of being club-based was that they were off the streets and so less likely to be arrested and prosecuted. What’s more, there was an endless stream of possible punters on hand, and no need to freeze on cold, wet street corners. What the women did with the customers once they’d left the premises was their own concern, although some club managers took a cut.

  A few clubs were, in fact, little more than fronts for brothels, and had rooms set aside where the real business of the night could be conducted. According to one interviewee, both Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies worked the clubs before they embarked on their infamous liaisons. Frankie Fraser also asserts in his book, Mad Frank’s London, that Mandy managed a nightclub before she was caught up in the very public Profumo scandal.

  Sylvia describes a common scam – one she assured me she never employed herself. ‘Some girls would arrange to meet a man somewhere well away from the club, such as the bar of a hotel if he looked smart and well-off enough, or Tottenham Court Road tube station if he didn’t. Of course, it was the girl’s job to fix the price and get it from the man before anything else happened. I was always surprised how easy it was to get men to part with their money, but they did. The girl would leave the club first, and either go home and leave the man hanging around at the agreed rendezvous, or, if the night was young, she would nip round the all night café for a coffee and a chat, then go back and start all over again with another customer if she thought the coast was clear.

  ‘If the bloke came back, or cut up rough, well, that was what the bouncers were for. They were ex-wrestlers or boxers, mainly. Every club had its toughs to keep troublemakers out, or toss them in to the street if they somehow managed to get in. I heard that some clubs used to pay genuine gangsters to sit around looking menacing, so no ordinary punter tried anything unpleasant or violent.’

  In Mad Frank’s London, Frankie Fraser confirms this: ‘The first club I ever owned was in 1955 in Old Compton Street and I had a Malt front it for me . . . I didn’t have to put a penny in it; they was just happy to have me on the payroll.’ Later on, he worked the same scheme with Albert Dimes, a notorious Soho-based gangster. ‘Again, I didn’t have to do anything, just show up of an evening so people could see who owned it, and so they weren’t going to cause no trouble.’ Frankie remembers the place with pride. ‘It was a classy joint, the Bonsoir in Gerrard Street, just about where the Le Ho Fook is today. It had a little band, food, everything.’ Including hostesses, no doubt. ‘The thing with Albert and me was we was well known.’

  I can certainly vouch for that. Even I, a mere ankle-biter at the time, knew them both by sight and knew that I had to keep out of their way. Not that they were interested in hurting children – in fact, Ronnie Mann, who was friends with a younger member of the Dimes clan, suggested quite the opposite – it was just that they looked scary, and were treated with a certain wary respect by all the other ‘faces’, including my father.

  The spivs who hawked a wide variety of black market goodies on street corners and in the pubs and snooker halls sometimes included smutty photographs among the stockings, bottles of booze, tins of Spam and other items that had ‘fallen off the back of a lorry’. A timely hiss from a flash geezer in a zoot suit would draw a prospective customer’s gaze to a furtive glimpse of a grainy, black and white image of a well-stacked, naked woman. The only requirement for a change of ownership of this, and a few similar pictures wrapped in plain, brown paper, was cash to grease an eagerly outstretched palm and the inclination to part with it.

  Sometimes, punters actually got what they had paid for. John Deakin, the Vogue photographer, sold explicit ‘beaver shots’ of Henrietta Moraes, a fellow member of the Soho Boho set, when he was short of drinking money. History doesn’t relate whether Henrietta received a percentage of the profits, but I doubt it, given Deakin’s reputation as a tightwad and all-round sleazy article.

  Other customers were not so lucky. As these transactions were so hurried and clandestine, many a green young – and not so young – man would only discover that he had been stiffed, so to speak, when he opened his treasure in private. He might find himself gazing at ten identical black and white photos of someone’s ample, but fully clothed, granny paddling in the sea at Southend, or possibly a wedge of dog-eared playing cards, cast-offs from a local spieler, or a few of Donald McGill’s wonderful saucy postcards, which were heavy on innuendo, but light on actual naked flesh.* The rapidly flashed photo was simply a hook to draw the customer in. Such rip-offs were all too frequent: after all, who was the punter going to complain to? Censorship was rigorous, and the law would have shown scant sympathy for his plight, especially if it interfered with their own lucrative business of taking bribes for ‘turning a blind one’.

  The common wisdom of the times was never to buy from street corner Johnnies, but to do business only with men known to you, or recommended by a friend, who plied their trade in premises tucked well away from plain sight down dingy alleys, in basements or up flights of stairs behind an anonymous door. My father ran such a shop from rooms above Parmigiani’s delicatessen on the corner of Old Compton Street and Frith Street. Father’s shop, and others like it, were highly illegal, but there was an arrangement in place that involved stuffing used banknotes in to an envelope and passing it over to one of the policemen who called at regular intervals.

  The shops took this duty in turn. If they should fail to hand over the bribes in time, then they were raided and their stock was sold to their competitors. It was all very well organized. One of my earliest memories is of giving a fat envelope to a man who smiled, patted me o
n the curls and muttered, ‘Ta, love. Tell your dad I’ll be round next month.’ He shoved the envelope, unopened, in to his coat pocket, and left as quietly as he had arrived.

  Although there were a number of these shops, men were still caught by spivs, because material bought from someone like Father inevitably cost more. This was because rent and bribes had to be paid and, of course, the books, pictures, magazines and flickering Super 8 and 16mm films had to be sourced. In those early days of the fifties, comparatively few of them were made in Britain. The majority of pornography came from France, Denmark and, later, Scandinavia and Holland.

  Spivs, on the other hand, were highly mobile, and could take to their toes to evade the law. That way, they only had to cough up hard cash if they were caught. What’s more, their material, if it was smutty at all, was likely to be shots of their girlfriends taken with a Box Brownie, which could be developed in a bathroom; if they didn’t have one, a walk-in cupboard or a pantry would do. Black and white photographs were incredibly easy to develop. I could do it myself by the time I was tall enough to reach the work surface. All that was needed was a darkroom, a red light, a light box for selecting the right negatives, a few trays of chemicals, photographic paper, a pair of tongs and a washing line, complete with pegs, to hang the photos up to dry. For the spivs’ purposes, great art was not needed: any grainy, under- or over-exposed picture would do. Their clientele were in no position to be picky. They drew their customers from casual tourists who had come Up West for a night on the tiles and, of course – in those days of war, conscription and National Service – servicemen on leave. Both types would be here today, gone tomorrow, and would likely be philosophical about being ‘had’ once they’d sobered up enough to focus clearly on their purchase. Unless they had a mate in the know, these men wouldn’t know where to find the ‘specialist shops’ like Father’s, which catered for a more experienced clientele.