Up West

by Pip Granger

  One of Father’s regulars was the operatic tenor, Gigli. He was a friend of Aldo, Father’s business partner. I can remember sitting on Gigli’s lap and being sung to while he waited for his friend, or for a preview of the new material recently brought across the Channel. Gigli habitually wore dove-grey, from the crown of his beautiful hat to his spats.

  The stock for the shop was smuggled in to England in a light aircraft, usually a Tiger Moth, piloted by my father. I often accompanied him on these trips. As a tiny girl with a blonde, curly mop and big blue eyes, I made an excellent smuggler’s moll: it looked as if Father was simply taking his little girl for a spin. In those days there was an embargo on taking currency out of the country. I think we were allowed £20 or £25 only, nowhere near enough to pay our suppliers in Le Touquet. It was my job to take the currency out. No matter what the weather, I had to wear a liberty bodice so that the huge, white fivers could be stuffed between it and my body. They prickled and tickled, and the liberty bodice made me sweaty and cranky in hot weather, but at least then the fivers went limp and didn’t tickle as much, or rustle as loudly, as they did on brisk autumn or winter days. I felt like a walking crisp packet when the money was new and crackly. My teddy, the hollow bodies of my dolls and my toy handbag were also called into service and stuffed with money – pornography was never cheap, even at wholesale prices.

  No Customs officer would suspect the father of a sweetiepie like me of smuggling smut with his little girl in tow or indeed, any teddy bear of being stuffed to its ears with illegally exported money to pay for the merchandise. How wrong they were, and how right Father was. To my knowledge, we were never searched when I was present. Of course, it’s possible that Her Majesty’s Customs were as easy to bribe as the West End’s policemen in those bleak days when everyone was so heartily sick of shortages and ‘making do’. Stiff upper lips were definitely becoming very slack by the early fifties, and even the most upright of citizens was open to the temptation of a few hundred fags and a bottle of brandy.

  The drummer, Raye Du-Val, was an equally inventive smuggler. ‘I was in the porn game,’ he remembers. ‘What I used to do was to bring in pictures. When I played on tour in France, I used to paste the packets in my drums. Made sure I didn’t have transparent drumskin heads, that’s how I brought my stuff in.’

  For several fairly obvious reasons, including death, embarrassment and the later acquisition of respectability, it was difficult to find anyone at all who was willing to be interviewed about their part in the pornography trade in the fifties, either as models, performers or retailers. Raye Du-Val mentions his role as a smuggler very briefly, and the only consumer of pornography and customer of shops such as Father’s who spoke insisted on anonymity for fear of censure, even in these more enlightened times. I suppose that the stigma of consumers being ‘dirty old men’ must still cling, even though Tom, as I will call him, was a young man when he first took the train from the genteel town in Surrey where he lived to the West End in search of sleaze. ‘I was lingering outside a porn shop in Cambridge Circus,’ he remembers, ‘summoning up the courage, if that’s what it was, to go in. The thing that I was immediately aware of when I went in there, was that I was potentially out of my depth: it seemed to be staffed or manned by what I can only describe as gangster types, it was rather a frightening lesson for a callow youth. They were talking to each other about cars, car engines, but then they stopped the conversation and looked at me. I wondered whether they were going to tell me to bugger off actually, but they didn’t, they asked me what I wanted, and as I didn’t really know, I was “Er, er” . . . So they said, “Well, have a look at this.” It was American import stuff, and then the price just came and it seemed arbitrary, everyone seemed to be paying a different price from what I could hear, and I thought to myself, “I’ve got to pay this if I want to leave here”, and it was a very rude shock. I felt very intimidated by the whole thing.

  ‘But, on the other hand, I felt that I had gone through a kind of rite of passage. Later, when I went back to buy books – and porn – I was kind of asking myself whether I could handle it or not, and I decided that I could. I wasn’t so much worried about the law as frightened somebody would say to me, “Listen, man, give us your money and fuck off.” Something like that. But, just as the working girls on the streets seemed to take the business routine in their stride, so the porn guys seemed to take the porn routines in their stride. In fact, they seemed to be thoroughly bored with it, really, because all their conversations were absolutely nothing to do with what they were doing. They were like men on the job, discussing things. You always felt, though, that this could turn a bit nasty.

  ‘What I do remember is that almost all the punters were quite passive, and orderly. They mostly wanted to come in and out, and I was fascinated by that, just in and out. People brought bags in, or wore coats with deep pockets: sums changed hands, then they were gone. There was all this X-rated material, and it was just feet away from where the general public was walking. But the main thing though, the prevailing memory, was what big business it seemed to be. Just so busy, so busy.’

  When I asked Tom what had brought him Up West in the first place, I got a very clear picture of how – and why – Soho looked so different from the outside than it did from the inside. ‘Soho featured in news broadcasts that I heard,’ he remembers. ‘It featured in some of the fiction that I read, and then, when I started reading the music papers, I was aware that so much music was based there. Not exactly Tin Pan Alley, but round that area.

  ‘So, all those things – and then there was the News of the World. We always had the People and the News of the World. My father wasn’t squeamish about that at all, although my mother certainly was [laughs], but I was intrigued. Some of the News of the World reporting was quite blatant; strip clubs, whatever, particularly the court cases involving sexual activity. I never really believed the time-honoured phrase that the reporters trotted out, “I made my excuses and left.” [He laughs again.] What red-blooded male would?

  ‘There seemed to be chests full of Danish material or American material, which was very iconoclastic stuff.’ Tom recalls. ‘I remember that one area of the ground floor, there was a wall given over to photography: on others they seemed to have movies, and there was a maze of shelves going around the shop where there was just material laid out. Another thing I noticed, which was almost something I thought was proverbial about porn sellers, was they all had wads. Wads of cash. Very large sums were involved. There was a man on the till, who sat above everybody else, so he had an overview of the thing, and he had sole charge of the money. One place I went to had this arrangement of mirrors, so from the back of the shop they could see who was coming in the door at any one time, and I suppose manage it from that point. Maybe they’d have five seconds’ notice if the police came through the door.’

  Personally, I don’t think the police would have worried these men at all: they were probably on the payroll. It was thieves after the cash, shoplifters after freebies, or rivals that they had to watch out for. Villains from a rival outfit may have come in looking for trouble, money, or both.

  Tom’s description of the shops and the men who ran them brought back vivid memories for me, although Father was out of the business years before Tom became a customer. Father always had a wad of notes in his pocket, for example, and so did his fellow shopkeepers. He and I would sometimes visit other shops – a courtesy call, so to speak, for a gossip about the dirty book trade, what was selling, what wasn’t, to compare prices and stock or to pass on rumours of a police crackdown. ‘Crackdowns’ usually only happened after some particularly damning article in a tabloid newspaper that purported to give the inside story of vice in Soho. The police would then have to make a show of being on the case.

  Sometimes we went to sell surplus stock, or to deliver items from our most recent trip to Le Touquet. Although I don’t remember Father’s shop being as Tom described, I do remember some of the others being just like it. In m
y time, none had a shop window. If they did, it was whitewashed to give the impression that the shopfitters and decorators were in. The only sign that that was not the case was that the whitewash never seemed to disappear. Later, the windows were blacked out, but that was after the law had been relaxed somewhat.

  Obviously, being so young, I was shielded from the exact nature of my father’s business. As I grew older, and Father had left the trade behind and turned more or less respectable, I was aware of some erotica on his bookshelves at home, and knew that, in the fifties, even Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Tropic of Cancer or the works of the Marquis de Sade were considered porn and banned under that archaic 1857 law,* but I never really saw the stuff he’d sold.

  ‘In several cases,’ Tom remembers, ‘there was a sort of anteroom that lured you in: then you went to a sort of hatch, and people seemed to say something and a door at the side opened. Well, I went in the door when someone else went in, and when you went in to the back room, there was much more extreme material – full penetration, group sex, lesbian sex, flage. The Danish material mainly seemed to be books of stills from films, but they told some crude kind of story in their way. The girls were always attractive, but the guys were the strange sort of guys you always see in porn movies. Fat hairy guys with moustaches. No child pornography, but stuff involving animals. That always seemed to be Danish or German. Down on the farm . . . [laughter] You got to look at pigs in a different light.’

  Tom tried to explain the appeal of this sleazy life to me. ‘The articles in the newspapers fascinated me when I was a teenager. They described a different world; it was forbidden. It kind of magnetized a lot of people like myself, and I thought the nearest I can get to it is to look at it, be a consumer, get some action that way. It was like having a badge. To the men who ran the shops, I was just some kid who spent his money, then got his arse out of there. But to me, I was negotiating my way through that scene without fumbling, without becoming a victim. I had a real sense of accomplishment. I mean, I left much poorer [laughs] but I had more or less what I wanted.’

  He pauses and thinks for a moment. ‘It was the low life I was interested in. I wanted to investigate that. Because I also found myself talking to a lot of down-and-outs, a lot of people who were peripheral people, marginalized people. It was the porn shop that really conferred that on me, confirmed that it was feasible to get in and out of that life. It was like a hunter coming back with the game. That’s how I saw it. The other thing that I remember was that I was aching for the knowledge of it really, and one of the principal reasons for it was that it was exclusively masculine territory. Forbidden territory too. It was a way to be a man.’

  Another important part of the sleaze industry were the strip clubs, which thrived in Soho long before they were made legal. The law dictated that if women and men were going to divest themselves of their clothing, they had best do it in the privacy of their own bedrooms, bathrooms or – in the case of men – the locker rooms of their sports clubs, but most definitely not in a theatre or a club in front of an audience.

  The famous Windmill Theatre, the one that kept open during the whole of the Second World War and boasted ‘We never closed,’ was allowed to display scantily clad and nude women, but only if they formed static ‘tableaux vivants’. No exposed jiggling, wriggling or writhing flesh was allowed, lest it inflame the lewd passions of the eager onlookers. If the tableau depicted some kind of mythological or historical scene, so much the better. Then, it could even be considered educational. This harks back to the Victorians again and the hypocritical attitudes enshrined in their laws. When it came to paintings, suitably draped nudes were allowed, providing the picture had a classical or biblical subject. A nude figure simply standing, lolling or doing something everyday like sweeping a floor, wafting a feather duster about or knocking up an omelette, was just plain lewd and therefore disgusting and illegal.

  Naturally, the West End club owners didn’t let a little thing like the law get in the way of making money. Jack Glicco points out in Madness after Midnight that strip clubs were alive, well and thriving as far back as the twenties, and probably before that. They were certainly around in the forties and fifties, despite the ever-present threat of prosecution, fines and subsequent closure. There were, of course, ways around the law, and every dubious club owner knew them. The crudest and simplest method was bribery and corruption, but there was also an elegant legal loophole involving private membership.

  The notion that private members’ clubs were sacrosanct dated back to the inception of the St James’s gentlemen’s clubs in the eighteenth century. Gambling was allowed in those, even when the law forbade the placing of bets by ordinary people – unless they were actually at a racecourse or dog track. Historically, there had long been one set of rules for the rich or titled and quite another for everyone else. It was good old British snobbery of course. A ‘gentleman’ was deemed to have the money and leisure to indulge himself at his club, while the lesser orders should, in theory, be too gainfully employed serving their betters in one capacity or another, to belong to a private members’ club. Besides, members had to be voted in: a working man would never have got as far as being nominated. At one time, even millionaires who’d made their piles in trade were snubbed by the ‘best’ clubs.

  West End club owners changed all that when they took advantage of the system to get strip shows past the censorship laws. Punters became temporary or life members by paying a small sub at the door. The same wheeze was used by those who wanted to show ‘adult’ films, ones that had been rejected or never seen by the censors, to a paying public. The first of these, the Compton Cinema Club, opened opposite the 2I’s at 56 Old Compton Street in 1960. The law, trained by previous generations never to bother a gentleman at his club, had no real provision for this new twist, and backhanders ensured that the local police made discretion their byword, unless the bribes were too small or there was trouble at a club that they were unable to ignore.

  The owners of strip clubs did their best not to give the police any excuse to declare their houses disorderly. Jack Glicco often earned his money playing at strip clubs as a musician, as did Raye Du-Val, and both agree that messing with the girls was not wise, thanks to the men behind the clubs. As Raye remembers, ‘I did the strip clubs, played all night. The girls in the clubs, you worked behind them, but you weren’t allowed to fool around with them, even in the seediest of clubs.’

  Things began to change radically when Paul Raymond (real name Geoffrey Anthony Quinn) opened the doors of the Raymond Revuebar on 14 April 1958. Before that, he had run a touring variety show that featured naked girls, who, like those at the Windmill Theatre, were not allowed to move. Rumour has it that Raymond handed out pea-shooters to some members of his audience so that well-aimed, hard little peas would produce some titillating action for the punters to enjoy, even if the poor bruised girls were less than thrilled. Tired of the law’s restriction, he took up the lease on the Doric Theatre in Walker’s Court, which joins the southern end of Berwick Street to Brewer Street, and opened his Revuebar using the private members scam operated by many small clubs before him.

  The difference was that in those clubs the scam was something that passed on a nod, a wink and lots of pound notes between club owners and the police, while Raymond advertised, and openly charged a guinea on the door for a lifetime membership. Within two years, Raymond’s Revuebar boasted amongst its vast membership, ‘Ten MPs, eight millionaires, more than sixty knights, thirty-five peers and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill.’ This information comes from a 1960 issue of the Spectator, appropriately enough.

  Like the Windmill, Raymond’s Revuebar prided itself on the lavishness of its sets, its costumes and, once the girls were permitted to move, its choreography, which may account for its incredible popularity with wealthy clients and its membership lists. The girls who worked in both places were seen as a cut above the rest, and a few went on to gre
ater things – although most simply slipped down the scale to work in seedier joints as their looks faded.

  Perhaps because his was not a private arrangement between him and the police, but a blatant one with his customers, Raymond was prosecuted in 1961. A barrister for the prosecution was heard to wonder how it was possible for all these people to be members of a private club when not one of them had been proposed and seconded by existing members and voted in by the membership, as was the usual practice at the clubs in St James’s, while the judge described Raymond’s enterprise as ‘filthy, disgusting and beastly’ when he heard how punters rang the three bells that made up the entire costume of Bonnie Bell, the Ding Dong Girl. He was also profoundly shocked by the image presented of Julia Mendez, the Snake Girl, swallowing her snake. He fined Raymond £5,000. This was a vast sum for the times – equivalent to six figures today – but it represented a fraction of the entrepreneur’s profits.

  Raymond carried on regardless, and where the Revuebar led, lots of other little clubs followed: there was certainly no shortage of punters. Victor Caplin paints a charming picture of the scene in the early sixties: ‘I remember visiting strip clubs like the Carnival on Old Compton Street. There were at least twenty clubs dotted around a very close area, and the girls would run from one to another, click-clacking hurriedly in their high heels, usually wearing toreador pants and perhaps an animal skin print blouse. They all carried one of those boxy little make-up cases. They would be fined if they were late for their spot.

  ‘It used to be so funny: these places were tiny, perhaps eight or ten rows of seats, maybe only six across and some standing room at the back. They were filled with guys with either a raincoat or a newspaper on their laps. There was always a few minutes to wait between each girl, and as people left, there would be a mad scramble over the seats to get to the front and a better view. The girls all looked so bored. They would prance across the stage, squinting as they moved in to the spotlights towards some tawdry prop, the odd piece of clothing falling to the floor. They would make a big deal about placing their own towel on the scuzzy chair that would support them as they finally revealed all, for one split second, as the curtains closed . . . and then the mad scramble for a better place and the wait for the next chance to see what all the big fuss was about.’