by Pip Granger
Another problem at the Freight Train was the occasional run-in with ‘Curly King and his gang, a bunch of East End gangster layabouts who always used to cause trouble in the West End. There was one black member, they called him “Omo”, and he was the only black guy I ever remember coming in the coffee bar. They were quite evil lads, always looking for a fight, getting in to running fights in the West End, throwing bricks through windows. We just got the edge of it all, the fracas: our windows would go in, something like that. Wally Whyton crossed swords with the gang for some reason, and for protection, he used to carry a crowbar down his trouser leg.
‘The Curly King gang were an unsavoury mob. Their girlfriends – they used to call them the Blackies, all dressed in black, black hair – would go up to a stranger in the street and ask him the time, and he’d get his watch out and they’d grab it, or they’d ask him for change for a note and just grab his wallet and run.’
Yet although there were people like the Curly King mob and the Blackies around, the locals rarely came across them as they went about their daily business. ‘I spent a lot of time in the area, and you could walk through it at night without any worries,’ Owen Gardner told me. ‘If you were an innocent person, you stayed an innocent person. If you wanted to find trouble, you could find it.’
Sometimes, however, trouble found you. ‘My brother David was one of the Krays’ first victims,’ Owen recalls. ‘He would have been eleven or twelve, so this was about 1949, 1950. On the way to Sunday School in Kingsway, my younger brothers walked through Covent Garden, and on the way back they picked up all these orange wrappers. Each individual orange had its own wrapping to keep them fresh, printed with different coloured designs. My little brothers would collect them like stamps.
‘So, this one time these lads came up to David and said, “What have you got there?” and he just said “Orange wrappers.” They started razoring David’s school blazer. He came home looking like a tramp, with it all shredded, and in one place they had cut through, and there was a cut on his back.
‘Anyway, we were one of the few places in those days who had a phone, and my father was friendly with the police in Bow Street, so he rang them. They found this whole mob of boys in Kingsway, I don’t know how many, six to eight maybe. The police grabbed two of them, sat them in the back of the car, and told them that they’d severed an artery in my brother’s back, and that he was in Charing Cross Hospital, and could die, and that they wanted to know who did it. The lads caved in and gave out the names of the Krays, and they were arrested. My father went to court with my brother. The Krays’ father, or someone, came up to my father, who was fuming, and said “I’m sorry that this has happened,” and offered him a lift home. I thought my father was going to hit him, but he resisted the temptation.’*
Owen Gardner’s father had a special relationship with the police at Bow Street because ‘There was a flat roof on Page’s warehouse, where we were living, and we used to let the police go up there at night. From there, with a pair of binoculars, they could see what was going on all the way round. They were always up on the roof if they wanted to watch somebody.’
Ronnie Mann was another to find out that it did no harm having the police owe you a favour. ‘Me and Keithy Clarke were going down to the Mercer’s Arms in Mercer Street – we were about seventeen, underage – and saw this copper getting beaten up by some bloke he’d tried to arrest. He was on the deck – only a young copper – and he was getting a right kicking. He was pleading for us to help him, and I was a bit wary, because this other guy was a bit tasty, although there were two of us, so I said, “Do yourself a favour, fuck off, because you’re only going to get yourself up shit creek, you’ll end up doing bird” – because that was what happened if you got done for assault on the Law. And he run off. The copper blew his whistle, and Bow Street come, and whether they got the bloke or not I dunno, but the reality of it was that we were there, and he said “Thanks for helping.”’
Ronnie realized how grateful the police had been for his help a year or two later. ‘Where I worked at Monroe’s, in the market, there was apparently quite a few blokes nicking off lorries and that. They had quite a thing going on one of them. The lorry would turn up and they would tell the driver to bugger off, and take as much stuff off as they could, and he’d come back and say he’d been nicked [robbed].
‘The first I knew about it, this policeman came up and asked if I was involved with this guy, so I said no. “If you are,” he said, “do yourself a favour. Lose yourself for the next couple of hours.” I wondered what he was on about. Well, it turned out they came in and nicked the whole lot, about six of them. They all done about two or three years in prison. I wasn’t involved, but if I had’ve been, I’d have ended up doing two or three years, and my whole life would have changed completely – except I would have got away with it because I stopped someone beating up a copper.’
Generally, even in the thick of the West End, Ronnie’s experience was the limit of most people’s contact with crime and criminals, as John Carnera explains. ‘They never bothered us, or worried us, because we were like civilians, if you like, and they were soldiers. If you were a civilian, you didn’t cross their paths.’
Alberto Camisa agreed with John, and was keen to express the dual nature of life in the West End. ‘There were two sides. There were the residents, who were law-abiding and well-behaved, and then there was the nightlife, the strip clubs, Revuebar, Sunset Strip, all of that. There was obviously some rough stuff, with the Maltese, the nightclubs and so on, but the residents didn’t get involved, and the two kept separate. People ask me about the protection racket, but there were no protection rackets with the ordinary shops. Just among themselves. The strip clubs, gambling clubs, they were all illegal, they paid protection. Normal residents had no problem with it.’
Despite what Alberto says, every now and then the two worlds, of the more or less law-abiding locals and the much less law-abiding incomers, did collide, and then there was trouble. Sometimes the outcome was unexpected. The Mann family’s picture-framing shop in Monmouth Street was next door to the Nucleus coffee bar, which Gary Winkler ran in the fifties. By the time Ronnie joined the family business in 1962, Gary was long gone, and the ambience in the Nucleus had taken a dive from the bohemian to the seedy. The Manns saw it as a haunt of druggies and general lowlife: ‘It stunk, and all the dossers used to come out in the morning. They’d stay there all night and when they come out, the smell was awful.’
Then, one day, ‘A mob turned up team-handed to sort out the guys that owned the Nucleus. Someone had let off these shotguns at the club in the morning, and my uncle and my dad were a bit pissed off about that. My uncle’s nickname was Tiny, and you can imagine why, and my dad was also a big geezer. They both done physical training, and they had big arms and were very fit.
‘I’d been down to the Seven Dials to get some stuff off the ironmongers, and as I was coming back, these guys have turned up, and they’re doing a lot of commotion, and one geezer said something to my old man, and he’s gone Bang! hit him right across the beak. Another one’s come haring up, and as he’s going by, my uncle’s gone Wallop, hit him into a parked car. Another one’s coming and I’ve got hold of him by the back, I’m kneeing him in the back, my dad’s chinned him, and there’s all these people in the street cheering, because they are all pissed off with the Nucleus, which by this time was a drug dealers’ den.
‘We had the police called, there were bodies everywhere. One kid turned round to me and gone “You”, and he’s gone like that [gestures] with a razor. As he’s done that my dad’s turned round and gone Wallop, and he’s gone down again, bodies everywhere.’
It sounds like a scene from a Western. An Up Western.
*From a three part documentary series called Underworld transmitted by BBC Bristol in 1994.
†Tommy Smithson was shot dead in Carlton Vale by Maltese hard-man Philip Ellul in 1956. Ellul was sentenced to death, reprieved a few days before he was
due to hang, and released on licence after eleven years. The Maltese crime boss ‘Big Frank’ Mifsud, who owned many of the flats rented out to prostitutes, and also ran clubs and spielers, gave him the gun, although Ellul maintains that nobody told him to kill Smithson: it was just an argument about machismo that escalated. ‘Once you have drawn a gun,’ he said after his release, ‘what are you going to do? Put it back in your pocket?’
*Two of the three robbers responsible for murdering de Antiquis were hanged, and the third escaped the rope because he was aged just seventeen.
*At sixteen, the young gunman, Christopher Craig, was too young for the noose. His innocent nineteen-year-old accomplice, Derek Bentley, was made an example of and hanged in his stead, despite being firmly in police hands when the fatal shot was fired. Bentley’s conviction was overturned in 1998, forty-five years after he was hanged. The result of this infamous miscarriage of justice was that it became a potent argument against capital punishment in this country. †For those too young to remember, cars used to be cranked up with a starting handle to get the engine going. They were heavy lumps of L-shaped metal. One end plugged into the front of the car and you cranked away to ‘turn the engine over’.
*If Mulla had lived Melvin would have been topped, if Mulla died he’d be hanged so suicide looked like a good option, especially as he was depressed and debt ridden – he’d die but he could take Mulla with him.
*Ten years later, the twins were back in the West End with bigger fish to fry. One victim of their ambition to move their centre of operations from the East was Bruce Brace, Ronnie’s uncle. ‘My uncle lost his clubs. The Krays broke it up. He was threatened by the Krays in the late fifties.’ Another story I was told about the Krays was by Victor Caplin about his Aunt Betty, who ran Les Enfants Terribles. ‘Her manager’s dad ran a boxing gym in the West End and was a “mate” of the Krays. At that time, the twins were operating a protection racket in Soho, but they never approached Betty as her manager’s dad had put a word in for her as she was doing all right by her son.’
Endpiece
When I set out to write this book, my main aim was to show that, contrary to popular belief, there’s far more to West Enders than a motley collection of gangsters, prostitutes, perverts, weirdos, bohemians and legions of the bewildered. I wanted to introduce you to some West Enders who don’t fall in to any of those categories, and whose families have managed to live industrious lives alongside eccentrics and seamier citizens with very little trouble, plenty of humane understanding and no hint of the ersatz outrage so beloved of the tabloids.
Although there are acres of print about the lives of the plucky East Enders who stood up to everything poverty and that ratbag Hitler could throw at them, few seem to associate the West End with equally plucky locals bringing up families in tenements, dodging doodlebugs and dealing with the daily triumphs and disasters of life. I have always been proud of – and grateful for – my association with Soho in particular, and the West End in general, and I know that other locals feel the same.
As the book took shape, and I listened and read more, I realized that it was about more than the communities that exist in the heart of the West End. I was astounded at just how often I found myself beginning a sentence with some variation on, ‘It’s hard for people today to imagine . . .’, and to realize how things that were commonplace just fifty short years ago are now downright historical: public baths, gas mantles, one-man bands, street vendors, mangles, horses and carts, lamplighters – it’s a long list.
Listening to the testimony of my generous contributors reminded me of so much that has disappeared virtually without trace, including such everyday conventions as calling a woman a lady, even when they so obviously were not. It was downright rude and patronizing to refer to females as ‘women’. The term was used by the well-heeled when talking about their charlady, or cleaner, and even then, never to her face: and, of course, there were derogatory references to ‘scarlet women’ or ‘the other woman’. There is also much about today that was beyond our imagining then, such as mobile phones, the fact that households without at least one television and at least one car would become the exception rather than the rule, that washing machines, fridges and even bathrooms would be a fixture in the vast majority of homes, that divorce would become common and that we’d be showing off our underwear to all and sundry as a fashion statement. It really is extraordinary.
The second thing that struck me was how far ahead of its time the West End was in the period covered by the book. I originally chose the post-war years because it was such a fascinating era. Before the two world wars, British society did change, of course it did, but slowly for the most part. The great majority of British people lived their whole lives in very small areas, but after the debris of the Second World War had been cleared away, the pace of change accelerated. Communities started to break up and young people were no longer content to become carbon copies of their parents and grandparents. Most cultural commentators look at the sixties as the time everything changed, but between 1945 and the early sixties, the West End was way ahead of the pack when it came to more enlightened attitudes towards sexuality, censorship, race, religion and the class system, among other things.
One reason for this is that the West End has long been an important centre for the performing arts, and where there are comedians, writers, musicians, theatres and clubs, there are dissenting voices who bring their subversive views to the notice of the public. Another factor was that many West Enders were refugees of one sort or another – political, religious, economic, sexual or simply unwanted elsewhere – and people who have suffered discrimination and repressive laws tend not, for the most part, to want to oppress anyone else. When you couple this general liberalism with the means of spreading the word, you have two of the major ingredients for change. It is no accident that the satirical magazine Private Eye and the Establishment Club, which also poured scorn and derision on our politicians and the ruling classes, were born in Soho in 1961. The West End was a safe place to be out of step with the masses: the avant-garde knew it, and flocked there.
Not only was the West End a place that positively celebrated difference, it did its best to accommodate those differences by producing the fashions that became the uniforms of the trendsetters and the music that they marched to. Modern and Trad jazz, skiffle, rock ’n’ roll, R & B and the clothes that marked you out as a devotee of one or the other lured the young Up West. And they, in turn, took their new-found tastes, styles and music back to their towns, villages and suburbs.
In the freewheeling sixties, the rest of the country caught up with what West Enders had taken for granted for, in some cases, decades. The iron grip of censorship slackened a bit with the court case concerning publication of D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, a book banned not only because it had explicit sexual content but because it was about an extramarital affair between a lady out of the top drawer and a gamekeeper from a drawer very near the bottom. Back in the West End, of course, people like my father had been flogging the book on the sly for years and lords and ladies had been seeking illicit pleasure with ‘lesser breeds’ for centuries. How we laughed at the judge who was so out of touch with the new world that he asked if the jury would want their ‘wives and servants’ to read such a disgusting book.
The Wolfenden Report of 1957 eventually led to a reform of the laws forbidding homosexual acts between consenting adults and slowly, slowly it became relatively safe to be gay outside of the West End.
Young adults became teenagers in their own right and rebelled in every way they could think of against a system that had always seemed to value class above ability and talent. They ‘turned on, tuned in and dropped out’; they made love, not war; and they stuck two fingers up at senseless rules, the establishment and the status quo – something that West Enders had been doing ever since they defied their monarch and built their hovels on Soho Fields and their ramshackle market on the Duke of Bedford’s posh piazza, and welcomed th
e gamblers, rakes, cross-dressers and all comers in to their midst.
What came shining through overall, though, was that despite all the changes Up West, the voices of its natives show that some really important things have not changed at all, namely their warmth, humanity, tolerance, generosity and good humour. Long may they continue.
The Interviewees
COVENT GARDENERS
Tricia Bryan (aka Patricia Taylor) was born in 1951 and grew up in a council flat in Tavistock Square. Her parents both had roots in the Holborn/Covent Garden area, and she went to St Giles’s School. Her maternal grandparents had a greengrocery business at the Seven Dials.
Owen Gardner was born in Watchet, Somerset, in 1934, and came to London after the war, when his father found work at Page’s, a catering kitchenware store in Shaftesbury Avenue. At first, the family lived above the firm’s warehouses in Upper St Martin’s Lane. Later they moved to another of the firm’s flats in Hallam Street on the north side of Oxford Street. Owen went to St Clement Danes, then on to Westminster College. After leaving school, he found a job in the buyers’ department at Page’s: he continued to work there until 1994.
Graham Jackson, was born in 1947 and grew up in the family flat in Bloomsbury. He went to school at St Giles-in-the-Fields and then St Martin-in-the-Fields. When he left school, it was to work for an undertaker who had a shop in Covent Garden.
Graham’s big sister, Olga Jackson, was born in 1932 and grew up in Shelton Street, close to the Seven Dials. Her father served as a police constable at Bow Street from 1925 to 1954. Her mother was a Sohoite. The family was bombed out of Covent Garden in 1944, and rehoused in Ridgmount Gardens in Bloomsbury. When she married in 1954, Olga moved to Clapton, but continued to work in offices in Holborn until 1959.