Up West

by Pip Granger

  Raye’s escapades earned him some time in an approved school. Violent criminals often received a more violent retribution. Coshboys could expect the cat or the birch in the late forties, while twelve months and twelve strokes was the standard punishment for street robbery – or mugging, as it’s now called. The police were not averse to dishing out the deterrents, either, as Ronnie Mann remembers. ‘If you got caught nicking stuff down the market, you’d get a wallop by the coppers, who’d smash you round the head. I mean, open fist. Fair enough, they’d send you home. There was no nicking you. They knew you’d nicked an apple, what’s the bleeding point? Everybody’s nicked apples as long as they grew on trees.

  ‘But you always knew what would happen if you got caught. If you got caught for thieving as an adult, you went to prison. You knew that if a copper told you to bugger off, you buggered off, because if you didn’t, you’d get hit. I remember when I was about fourteen in Trafalgar Square, firework night, and some coppers came and said “Go home,” and one of my mates was, “Why should I?” He was in that Black Maria like eyes that are winking. Out about ten minutes later, bloody nose, black eye, tooth bleeding . . .

  ‘I’m not saying it was right, but you knew, as far as I was concerned, where the boundaries were. Same as if you swore in school, you got expelled. The police was the authority. I’m not saying it was right, but if you knew the rules, that was what it was all about. If they said to you, “Don’t do it,” there was no good you saying, “These are my civil rights,” as far as I was concerned.’

  Most teenagers would probably have preferred a bang round the ear from a copper to what awaited those whose lawlessness went beyond that kind of rough justice. ‘When I was fourteen,’ Ronnie remembers, ‘two mates of mine, Fred and Cyril, were caught lifting stuff out of the Civil Service Stores – combs, toothpaste, little amount of cash. Fred got off because his dad had been in the RAF. Cyril was branded a bad apple, although he wasn’t; funnily enough, he was probably the least bad apple of the lot. He got a month in Borstal or whatever it was at the time, approved school, wherever, and came out after two weeks. They had to discharge him because he was so frightened and so scared. That guy never committed another offence. He said it was horrific, he started to eat soap and stuff to make himself ill, to get out of the main drag.’

  Andy Pullinger was another one who learned the hard way that the police were not for cheeking. ‘Not far from the 2I’s was a pub where we would go to cool off after a couple of hours crammed in the basement. One night there was a fight inside the pub (not with us). The police arrived and asked everyone to move on. I was stubborn and asked the officer to repeat what he had said. He said to f— off, to which I asked again what he had said.

  ‘His reply was “George, grab him”. George grabbed me and they carted me off to Broadwick Street police station for obstructing a policeman in the course of his duty. Next day it cost me ten shillings at Bow Street magistrates’ court.

  ‘Another time I was arrested for impersonating a policeman. We had bought some helmets at a surplus store and were parading them around on Wardour Street. I was taken off to Broadwick Street again and charged. Later, they proved the helmets were surplus and should have let me go, but instead I was charged with insulting a policeman. He said I shouted out, “All coppers are bastards.” Later, in the cell, he told me that it was one of my friends who had said it. Another ten shillings at Bow Street and advised to get rid of the helmet.’

  As the children of a beat bobby from Bow Street, Olga and Graham Jackson both remember the rather ambivalent way the police were viewed in the community. ‘Some people didn’t have a lot to do with us because our father was Snaky Jackson, and it could be their father that he’d knocked off, as they used to call it. And if their father’s been knocked off, and is in prison, because of your father, you’d get this stigma. Our brother Arthur got a bit of stick, and so did Mum. She used to get called names across the road.’

  Graham remembers how his father ‘used to take me through Covent Garden after he’d retired from the force, and you’d get these comments: “Hello, you old bastard, ain’t you dead yet?” “Look who it isn’t.” And each time I’d say, “Who’s that?” and he’d say, “Oh I nicked him” – usually for illegal betting. But there was a respect. He was a copper, and he’d knicked him, but there was still that respect.’

  I don’t think that respect extended to the more hardened criminals, but the sight of a uniform definitely gave the more timid or would-be miscreant pause. ‘Dad kept his helmet hanging behind the door,’ Graham recalls, ‘so when Mum opened the door to a stranger, they saw the policeman’s helmet. That would have frightened someone then; today, it would be a challenge. I remember he’d say he would go down the street wearing his helmet, and turn the corner, and everybody would go [scarpering noises], and the prostitutes would [same scarpering noise, only quicker and more high-pitched]. He didn’t have to do anything. What he’d do was, creep round the other way and nick ’em. [laughter]’

  Bow Street, where Constable Jackson spent his whole working life, looked after the Covent Garden area, but the main police station was West End Central, where Charles Hasler was a sergeant. He was on the desk, and on the beat, for what he describes as ‘three happy years’ in the early fifties. He lived in Islington, but many others at the station lived in the heart of the West End, in Sandringham Buildings in Charing Cross Road or the police section house in Broadwick Street. ‘As a sergeant,’ he told me, ‘you get to spend a lot of time at the station. I never got to know the area intimately in the three years I spent there in the way I did in thirteen years at Marylebone. Of course, in West End Central, there was a hell of a lot to get to know. It took in the whole length of Oxford Street, right down Charing Cross Road to Trafalgar Square, right around the Square to Pall Mall, along Pall Mall up to Green Park, then back up to Piccadilly and right round to Marble Arch.’

  The police were as likely to be involved in crowd or traffic control as catching villains, Charles remembers. ‘In those days, Oxford Street would be even more crowded than nowadays with shoppers. Crowd control was necessary particularly before Christmas. There were so many, they couldn’t stay on the pavement. You’d have bodies sent down from as far away as Haringay just to keep people off the road, literally shoving them off the junctions so the traffic could get through.’

  The bobbies on the beat spent much more time out nicking fly-pitching spivs and barrow boys than they did chasing down gangsters. ‘We had to go round checking these guys’ licences, and if they didn’t have one they’d be wheeled down to the station and charged with obstructing the highway. Down Oxford Street, nearly every corner would have somebody with a barrow. Especially in the festive season, they’d come out selling anything on their barrows. Or from a suitcase, the suitcase boys.

  ‘People used to earn a living standing outside Selfridges, selling jewellery, anything. There were whole families involved in it,’ Charles says. ‘There were others down around Oxford Circus, another group, basically Italians from Clerkenwell, and they specialized in lingerie or stockings. I don’t know where they got them from, but they were reasonable stuff, sold in suitcases outside John Lewis.’

  Graham Jackson’s work in the funeral trade meant he dealt with the send-off of several members of the more colourful reaches of the underworld, and he confirmed that minor villainy was often a family business. ‘There was a family in Drury Lane, a well-known dodgy family, and I remember going home one day and saying so-and-so was dead, and Dad said, “At last.” He’d been a thorn in his side.’ He also remembers a funeral of one of these local villains at ‘one of those little houses off Drury Lane. They had this thing about lying at home. They chose this big lead-lined casket, all polished and shiny and that sort of thing, and they wanted him to lie at home. Well, it was only a narrow stair, and a big casket, so someone suggested taking him upstairs first, and then taking the casket up. To get it up, they tipped it sideways, not thinking it’s got to come down. So w
e’ve all gone in there, to pick it up, and I’ll always remember my old governor has measured the width of the banisters, and it’s like an inch too narrow. We can’t just tip it up and bring it down because you’ve got, you know, Rent a Crowd outside.

  ‘And one of these guys comes in, big guy, like the Mafia or something, and says, “Got a problem?” “No, no, no. No problem.” “Well there must be a problem. Tell me, and we’ll sort it out.” “Well, the stairs aren’t wide enough.” So he got hold of the banisters and went [crunching, tearing, splintering noise] took the banisters right off the stairs.

  ‘There was always a bottle of whisky and six glasses sitting in the room for the pall-bearers [at these funerals]. Dare we touch it? No-o-o-o.’

  There was a certain tolerance of petty villainy, providing no one got hurt. ‘A lot of the criminals in those days were characters,’ Graham Jackson remembers. ‘Dad knew them. They knew they were nicked, they went to the court, paid their fine, ten shillings or whatever, and off they’d go again, and that was it.’

  Ronnie Mann remembers that ‘Chris Pussy had a bent second-hand shop in Monmouth Street. She was the local fence. I don’t know whether Pussy was a surname or a nickname. The family were Irish. If you wanted anything cheap . . . It was just a little old junk shop, but when you walked in to the back it was like Aladdin’s Cave. I remember buying my first suit there, a Daks suit, that was about a quarter of the price. She must be dead and buried now. It can’t be far short of fifty years ago.’

  Some people simply could not resist a scam. Owen Gardner remembers ‘a guy who had a restaurant called Gilbert’s, Chez Gilbert he called it, and he was always in trouble with the law. In one case, he was accused by the police of getting his wife to knock him on the head, tie him up and rob his own safe. That old story.’

  And then, of course, there were the specialists. The West End is full of bookshops, marching up both sides of the Charing Cross Road, scattered in side streets around the British Museum and clustered by the University. Gary Winkler who ran the Nucleus coffee bar, particularly remembers ‘Nooky, who was famous for his long overcoat, two arms out that weren’t his arms tucked in to his pockets, and on the inside of the overcoat long pockets.’ Nooky was a striking figure, with jet black hair and a hooked nose. He’d take orders for books from interested parties, then stroll around Foyles and other bookshops in Charing Cross Road looking for his orders. While apparently browsing the shelves, Nooky’s real hands would snake out of the front of the coat, grab the books he wanted and tuck them snugly in to the many pockets. To the casual onlooker, and even to the store detective, it seemed as if his hands were still safely tucked in to his pockets. Amazingly, he was never caught.

  Peter Southon wrote and told me that Nooky – or someone very like him with a similar garment – also used to come in to the Sam Widges coffee bar in the late fifties to take orders for textbooks from hard-up students from London University, with a sliding scale of charges depending on the size of the book and its cover price. Then again, it’s possible that there were several men wandering up and down Charing Cross Road with poachers’ pouches sewn in to their overcoat and prosthetic arms disappearing in to its pockets. That’s certainly what Ronnie Mann believes: ‘There was quite a few of them around, people who used to nick books. A bloke who’s dead now, I used to know at school, that was his game. He used to have the overcoat, with the arms in the pocket, and the false pockets inside the thing as well, so he could slip things inside them.’

  The West End had some problems to overcome that weren’t shared by the rest of the capital. ‘Other places in London might have had rough people, but they were all local rough people,’ Ronnie Mann told me. ‘The problem with the West End was all the people coming in. You had the Nuffield Centre down by St Martin’s Lane, which was the forces, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, British, and they used to fight like hell. Down in Bedfordbury, you had the Welsh Harp at the corner, the Marquis of Granby, the Black Horse. Now the Black Horse, there was always fights with the soldiers, right up through the forties to the early fifties, there was still loads of people stationed over here.’

  Charles Hasler agrees. ‘The West End was always full of people from all over. In my day, in the early fifties, you couldn’t move for American servicemen. In Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square, you would always find up to three, sometimes four, West End Central police officers, four or five American Snowdrops [military police officers] with their white helmets walking around, and a couple of pairs of our Redcaps. I mean, I was there when the Korean war was going on, and the number of people over the wall [Absent Without Leave or AWOL] from various places was tremendous.’

  Another place you could more or less be guaranteed to find a good punch-up was the South Bank. ‘After the Festival of Britain was on in 1951, that area all became derelict,’ remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘It was like a huge gladiatorial fighting ground. Gangs used to come from, well, everywhere, it seemed to me, like Roman legions fighting each other. On reflection, it was this macho image from the war. There might have been gang violence, punch-ups, but it was macho, rather than gang. When you had a fight, it was to prove you were tougher. You didn’t have to kick the shit out of someone or stick the knife in, that was beneath you.’

  Andy Pullinger was a Ted, but one with a restrained, even genteel side to his violence. ‘Compared to today’s gangs, we were a calm bunch. There were quite a gang of us. Coming from all over. Some from the Elephant & Castle area, others from Camden Town and Knightsbridge. There was Sweetpea, Glen Cardno, Tom Mathers, Spider, who was very short, and Willy, who was tall and thin. Willy carried around large quantities of change because, as he said, if he got rolled they would only look for the pound notes. There was an occasional fight at the pub around the corner on Dean Street. No weapons were used apart from putting the boot in.’

  Pubs formed the focus for many a fight; the line between a knees-up and a punch-up is an easy one to cross. ‘One New Year’s,’ Mike O’Rouke remembers, ‘we were down the Mercer’s Arms, my old man’s playing the piano, and this gang, they’re in their late twenties, had come in, and the old girl says, “No, I’m not serving you.” They came up to where I’m standing in the pub, talking, holding a pint of beer, and this guy barges in to me, drink all over me, and I said something, and he said, “Right, outside.” As he went out, Wallop, my dad’s chinned him.

  ‘Within seconds the bloody place was in uproar. My sister’s saying “Don’t hit him, dad, don’t hit him,” and the poor little sod, my old man’s chinning him left and right. All the geezers who’d been drinking and were tight as lords had come out, and there was punch-ups galore in the street. Somebody said to call the police. They phoned for help and they said we can’t come, there’s nobody left in Bow Street. You can never get a policeman on New Year’s Eve.’

  While most people knew the rules about violence, things could escalate, if someone was reckless enough to ignore the warning signs, as Ronnie ruefully remembers. ‘When I had my teeth knocked out down the Lyceum, it was my fault. I should have known better. I was a bit cocky. I was working in the market, I was fairly fit, fairly strong, I’d done a bit of boxing when I was a kid. I got knocked out twice in successive fights, so I wasn’t very good, but I was still cocky enough to think I could handle myself. It was a lunchtime, and there was this girl I fancied, so I went over and danced, and I should have known then there was a group of guys she’d been dancing with, but I couldn’t give a shit. When I come off, they all come around me, and I could still have got away, but I was just “F off” and all that.

  ‘Thinking back, the guy who done it was two or three years older, a lot tougher and stronger and bigger, and in a one-to-one he’d probably have won in any case, but as soon as he slipped a knuckleduster on, and there was three or four of them, you knew what was going to happen. Most people thought I deserved it, because of what I’d done, and when the bouncers turned up afterwards, they didn’t want to get involved with this guy. I didn’t kno
w him, but he was obviously a lot tougher, and had a rep. Those bouncers were tough, too: I saw them in a fight and they opened up the exit – you know, “Push Bar to Open” – with this guy’s head, banged it on the bar then literally flung him out.’

  While Ronnie’s childhood gang from the Bedfordbury would take on the other Peabodyites from Wild Street in great mêlées, others found different reasons to take sides. John Carnera steered clear, but his brother did not. ‘He did get involved in a little bit of gang warfare, because there were rival gangs, you know. For example, in those days, my brother and his mates were all up in arms against Greeks. There were a lot of Greek kids. There were one or two big fights down in Golden Square. Pitched battles. Fists and other things flying about as well. This was the mid fifties. He was involved in that, I was a bit young. Kids at that age wanted to show off who they were, so they formed gangs and then went looking for other gangs. That’s the way it happens.’

  Sometimes outside events intervened to give street fights a particularly vicious edge, as Chas McDevitt remembers: ‘There was quite a lot of trouble at the Freight Train, because around the corner from us, in one of the mews behind Berwick Street was a Cypriot club, and this was at the time of the Cypriot–Greek troubles in Cyprus, so there were often fights. I saw a bloke stagger up the road and actually die outside the coffee bar. Fell on the pavement and died from stab wounds.’