London Belongs to Me
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7 raided: An occupational hazard of London’s nightclubs in the 1920s and 1930s was falling foul of the new bewildering laws governing the serving of food and the selling of alcohol. A 1921 Act allowed drink to be served until 12.30 a.m., as long as it was accompanied by food, and nightclubs soon sprang up across the West End. At most nightclubs the only food available was sandwiches, and the more exclusive the venue the more unwelcome the food. Patrons frequenting the prestigious Café Royal near Piccadilly Circus who asked for a sandwich at a inconvenient time would be asked by one of the many waiters that came with permanent sneers attached: ‘Would that be for eating, sir?’ The most raided West End nightclubs in the London Belongs to Me era were those run by Kate Meyrick, a regular attender of the local courts, her appearances being the only occasions when most people ever saw her in daylight.
8 Moonrakers: A name purloined by Ian Fleming for his 1955 James Bond story.
9 Embassy in Carlton House Terrace: The Prussian Embassy in the nineteenth century, it was the German Embassy until the Second World War. Here German ambassador Leopold von Hoesch died of heart failure after collapsing in the bathroom in 1936, a fatality that immediately led to rumours spreading through London political circles that he had been assassinated by the Nazis, with whom he had not shared political sympathies.
10 She’d let Jack the Ripper stop if he could pay: An ingenious line which conceals much. The British impressionist artist Walter Sickert believed that he lodged in a Camden Town room early in the twentieth century that had been used by the infamous serial killer. This followed a conversation with his landlady, who suspected a previous lodger. Sickert painted the room and called it Jack the Ripper’s Bedroom (1908). Another of his paintings, The Camden Town Murder or What Shall we do for the Rent? (1908), was based on the real‐life unsolved murder of Phyllis Dimmock the previous year. In the late 1920s Sickert would perambulate London dressed as the Ripper. After his death in 1942 rumours began to circulate that the painter may have known too much. He increasingly began to be linked with the Ripper murders, a theory that was brilliantly explained in Stephen Knight’s 1976 work Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution and was taken up by Patricia Cornwell in her 2002 book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper – Case Closed.
11 Black Cat factory: An outré 1920s Art Deco block in Camden Town which at one time was the world’s biggest cigarette factory, home of the Black Cat brand, and the world’s largest reinforced concrete building. The building features a number of Egyptian‐flavoured embellishments that were inspired by the recent discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the temple of Bubas, the cat‐headed goddess. It is now the more prosaically named Greater London House.
12 The Trocadero: One of the most popular early twentieth‐century West End music halls, located by Piccadilly Circus, where acts would quickly whip up the crowd with jokes like: ‘Are your relatives in business?’, ‘Yes – in the iron and steel business’. ‘Oh, indeed?’, ‘Yes – me mother irons and me father steals’.
13 Blakers: Squales is such a sham he doesn’t even realize that the Tate is showing paintings by William Blake, not Blaker.
14 14 And, if you feel like it, you can walk into any railway ticket office and book straight through to Berlin: William Joyce, the leading British fascist who became known as ‘Lord Haw Haw’ following his war‐time pro‐Nazi broadcasts from Germany, left Britain bound for Berlin by boat‐train only a few days before the British Government enacted the Emergency Defence Regulations to prevent such travel. When the porter at Victoria station asked the Joyces where they were going and was told Berlin he replied: ‘Blimey, that’s a peculiar place to be going just now!’
15 Dalston High Street: There is no Dalston High Street. It is Kingsland High Street, as Collins surely must have known.
16 St George’s, Hanover Square or St Margaret’s: The two most likely London churches for society weddings in those days. St George’s features in My Fair Lady. St Margaret’s by Westminster Abbey was where Winston Churchill was married in 1908 and the Hon. Frank Pakenham (the future Lord Longford) was married in November 1931, nuptials attended by the writers John Betjeman, Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh, with the flamboyant Tory politician, Lord Birkenhead (Fred Smith), as best man.
17 Portobello Road: This was before the days of Portobello Road as a leading market. In London terms Portobello Road is an extremely long road, stretching from the shabby parts in North Kensington for two miles to a point near Notting Hill Gate. At this southern end Portobello Road was a haven of tight‐lipped respectability. Indeed, George Orwell, who briefly lived at No. 22 in the 1920s, told an illustrative story about the landlady, a Mrs Craig, who had been a maid to a titled lady and was an insufferable snob. One day Orwell came home to find the occupants locked out and staring hopefully at an open window upstairs. He suggested they borrow a ladder visible in the front garden next door to gain entrance but Mrs Craig objected on the grounds that in fourteen years of living there she had never spoken to her working‐class neighbours and wasn’t going to do so now. Instead the writer was obliged to walk a mile to a friend’s house to borrow their ladder – and walk back with it. Mrs Vizzard would no doubt have heartily approved of Mrs Craig’s stance.
18 Captain Ramsay and Sir Oswald Mosley: Captain Archibald Ramsay, Conservative MP for Peebles, was a Nazi sympathiser who was arrested on the steps of his Kensington house on 23 May 1940 in the early months of the Second World War for engaging in fifth‐column activities. The law had just been changed so that he could be jailed and prevented from informing the House of Commons that Winston Churchill, not then prime minister, had been secretly commun icating with the American President F. D. Roosevelt. Had Ramsay been able to raise the matter, Churchill would have been severely embarrassed, may never have become prime minister, and America may have been more reticent about entering the War. Ramsay remained in jail for four years. Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, was also interred during the war but was no longer an MP.
19 breach of promise: The most famous literary breach of promise, the breaking off of an impending marriage unexpectedly, is that of Mrs Bardell v Mr Pickwick in Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers.
20 Dr Hapfel’s last ride: A fitting way for the Nazi spy to go given that most Jewish victims of the concentration camps were sent to their doom by train. We don’t find out what happens to Hapfel but perhaps Collins contemplated having him shot at the Tower like Josef Jakobs, a German spy, who on 15 August 1941 became the last person to be executed there. Jakobs was tied to a Windsor chair, a white lint pinned on his chest over his heart, and shot by an eight‐man firing squad at 7.12 a.m. He was buried in an unmarked grave at Kensal Green.
21 intern him: When Italy joined the Second World War in 1940 prime minister Winston Churchill ordered that all London’s Italians be rounded up and interned, thereby avoiding the need to differentiate between those who felt allegiances to their ancestors’ homeland and those who wanted to fight for their birthplace. The government’s actions infuriated loyal subjects such as the restaurateur Peppino Leoni, founder of the long‐running Quo Vadis restaurant. The Italians were mostly interned on the Isle of Man or at Bury, Lancashire.