The North of England Home Service (14 page)

Ray emerged from both of his auditions with respectable results and went home with a promise of future work from the Corporation. Broadcasting on the BBC in the radio days was a sign of prestige and arrival. They employed him steadily for three or four years as the number-two comic and then the compère of variety programmes (‘presenting the people of variety to a variety of people’) made specifically for and broadcast only in the North East region. The problem was that, because the North East had lost its own wavelength at the end of the war, they had to share a wavelength with Ulster, and North of England Home Service programmes were heard only on the whim of Broadcasting House, Belfast. More often than not this meant that, when Betty’s and Ray’s friends and family gathered round a set to hear him on
Workers
’
Playtime
or
Wot
Cheor
,
Geordie
,
he’d be faded out to make way for long dreary hours of Irish jigs and sports news from Ulster.

He wouldn’t hear the call from London again for a further six years. By which time he had comprehensively Italian-Americanized
his appearance and deregionalized his accent and become
personable
, prosperous, ochre-faced, slick. They were years that gave him the chance to get his ducks on the pond, as he would later (often) say.

There is a respectable chance that while Ray and his mother were sitting over their austerity-busting luxuries in the Corner House in the Strand, Jackie was in the Coventry Street Joe Lyons not far away, where he was liable to be mixing with the
prostitutes
who worked the pavements of Shaftesbury Avenue and Lisle Street (‘You’ll always find a smile in Lisle Street’ was the joke there), and the Cypriots and the ‘Malts’ who were their ponces, and visiting Americans in forces bands who were exempt from the Musicians’ Union ban, and men who fancied themselves on the cobbles but who you would never get in a ring, and junkies clutching their scripts for the all-night chemist in the Circus, and servicemen and brasses fresh in from the Potomac Club or the Bouillabaisse or the Fullado, stumbling on doctored whisky, and Tubby Hayes and Stan Tracey and other young English players who would congregate at the all-night Coventry Street Corner House to meet the American jazzmen there and listen to their stories about being in Benny Carter’s band and playing with
legendary
figures like Dexter Gordon in unattainable meccas like Memphis and Chicago and glean ideas from them. They had a band in the gallery in the all-night Joe Lyons and the waitresses all wore smart little black dresses and were known as ‘nippies’, presumably because they nipped in and out smartish to take the orders and get the food for the faces and the chaps, and all human life was there in those days really, as the saying went. A thousand stories under the sky.

But, after Chatteris, it was Hackney that for Jackie on his first visits had seemed like the big beating heart of the West End. And for a while they had managed to convince him that the West End was where he was. There were quantities of drink and women,
strings of Christmas lights, pungent and exotic smells; the press of bodies, the occasional flashes of bright modernity in the close huddled streets. And, hick that he was – carrot-cruncher,
shit-kicker
; he knew the words – Jackie had been taken in. There had been distraction enough to keep his attention for a while.

As a boy, when he came from Chatteris to the East End, he loathed London so heartily that he would cycle home through the night after a contest, or bribe a lorry driver with half his purse to give him a lift home. As a prospective champion, and even as a prospect whose brilliant future was irretrievably behind him, the bright lights could not be too bright for Jackie, the dance bands could not play too long or too loud; the party could not be too frolicsome.

After a bout at one of Mr Solomons’ celebrated smokers at the Café Royal, for an example, he would take the pats on the back and pocket his nobbins and then after a few drinks in the company of the punters, managers, corner men and boxers who jostled each other in the bar at the Regent Palace Hotel, which was dependably a maelstrom of fight chat on those nights, he’d take off with his pal, another young fighter called Sammy Silver, for Toliani’s Latin Quarter or the Café de Paris or, occasionally, depending on how the spondulicks was holding up, such a place as the Empress Club in Berkeley Square where the lardee went to tear up the rug. After that it was on to the Corner House or one of the tea stalls that ringed the piazza at the all-night market and then sometimes, if he was very lucky, Jackie would end up going home with one of the nippies from Joe Lyons, a lively little brunette called Greta. Greta was half on the game, but if she didn’t have a paying customer she’d let Jackie go back with her to her place in Phoenix House, a rabbit warren of tiny apartments above the Phoenix Theatre in Charing Cross Road, where she’d let him have one on the slate.

Afterwards, with the dawn coming up, he’d walk through
Soho, where the last stragglers from the spielers and near-beer joints would be sharing the pavements with people going to work in the snack bars and kitchens and the newly delivered ice blocks which would already be starting to melt. The seen-it-all, white-overalled dairymen would be making their deliveries and the Continental butcher could be receiving the day’s horse sections.

In a few hours, men would be forming a straggling queue along Great Windmill Street in front of the Windmill Theatre, whose boast during the war had been ‘We Never Clothed’. By 11 a.m., the peeping Toms would have gathered on the corner of Archer Street opposite the hallkeeper’s office at the Windmill hoping to catch quick flashes of the girls running up and down the stairs to and from the stage in their plumed head-dresses and pasted-on tassels and stars. (A narrow window on the last
half-landing
before you reached the Solomons gym looked straight across Great Windmill Street to the ‘undressing rooms’ of the theatre’s lovelies and was also always heavily subscribed.) There was a convent a few doors along, and sometimes as Jackie washed up there in that pre-dawn hour it was possible to hear the nuns singing Gounod’s ‘Sacré Cœur’.

He had been entrusted by Mr Solomons with the key to the gym. And, after cadging a warm roll or a sweet-smelling
cinnamon
Danish from the still-shuttered ‘Nosherie’, which occupied the ground floor of the building, Jackie would climb the stairs to the ‘Palace of Sock’, as it had become widely known, and flop down on the old couch in the laundry room under the picture of a platinum blonde in a pea-green bathing costume stuck to the wall with a piece of soap, and wait for ‘Jolly Jack’, the boss, to arrive and announce with the bravado of his arrival that it was time to commence getting into another day.

Actually, on most days, ‘the motley throng’, as Mr Solomons called them, would have gathered around the whisky cabinet in
his inner sanctum by the time he rolled up, the motley for the most part consisting of the boxing writers for the daily papers, give or take the odd
shvartzer
or provincial promoter. The scribes themselves would have been beaten to it by several hours by the boxers and trainers and the various gym rats and hangers-on who would already be spilling sweat sparring, working on the light bag, the heavy bag, the tattoo ball, etcetera. The gym would already be loud with the kind of effort befitting its reputation as the forcing house of champions and giving the sense that it was a place of serious endeavour. But it was only with the arrival of the nabob of the noble art himself, Mr Solomons, every day with a bang and a crash that the Solomons gym could be said to truly spark into life.

Mr Solomons never simply walked in anywhere. Mr Solomons pushed his way into offices, conversations, all through life. Big, blustering, fast-talking, fast-living, glint-eyed, bulbous-nosed, Mr Solomons (motto: ‘All the world’s a fiddle!’) was one of the most controversial, colourful and supremely sure-of-himself members of the managerial ranks. Habitual wearer of a
snap-brim
trilby, a tie that needed volume control and a suit with enough padding in the shoulders to pack Harringay (these were his own lines, it’s why he got so much ink; he was very good), he also unfailingly wore a yellow rose in the lapel of his camel’s-hair topcoat and had another waiting in a stem vase in his inner office to be sniffed and turned and finally threaded through the
buttonhole
of his suit jacket.

Where to begin with this Mr Solomons, who the Game hadn’t seen anything like since the days of cigar-smoking Joe (Yussel the Muscle) Jacobs, Hymie Caplan, Dumb Dan Morgan, Jimmy (The Boy Bandit) Johnston, Billy McCarney and other managers with more colour than their fighters? And the aforementioned were all Yanks. Perhaps the oddest thing about Jolly Jack was that, despite all the best efforts of himself and his fastidious wife, Fay, and in
spite of the masking masculine odours of cigar smoke and the high-class (black-market) ‘Tweed’ cologne which he took care to splash on, he always smelled faintly but unmistakably of fish.

‘King Cod’ was Jack’s other nickname away from the ring, based on the early-morning business he ran with his brother Maxie at Billingsgate, wholesaling prime mackerel, haddock and hake. ‘I started on the up and up slapping fish on a slab. And as with fish, so with fights. Only more so. If you sell fish – as I do – give ’em big fish. If you promote fights – as I do – give ’em big fights. Stick to this way of doing business and you can’t go wrong. Maybe!
Kin-a-hora!
’
(Which means: ‘May the evil eye not fall on me’; ‘Touch wood’.)

Almost all of Mr Solomons’ first wave of visitors, in a phrase coined by one of his cronies, the
News
of
the
World
’s boxing man, Frank Butler, were men who were ‘tenpercental’. Milling around in the gym and the outer office when the boss breezed in would be club-owners, bouncers, bruisers, burglars, ex-boxing champions, con men, ponces, pickpockets, fences, racketeers, car salesmen and visiting Americans in dark glasses; all desirous, all itchy and soliciting a piece of his time.

Jack, the archetypal
alrightnik
,
liked a good villain. And, if they were respectful, then, seated behind his desk and talking around a large cigar, he would express sympathy, ask encouraging
questions
, and finally tell them that everything possible would be done. If necessary, toes could be stepped on.

But if one of the desirous ones was pushy, antagonistic, demanding instead of imploring inside his teddy-bear coat, or if they were bold enough to be critical of Mr Solomons, to blame him for their problems, he would rub his hands together, harder and harder. In a long, difficult meeting, his hands would get raw. His voice would grow lower, softer, and the corner of his mouth would turn down. At this point, those who knew him would back off. They knew what was next. But the foolhardy would mistake
his lowered voice for nervousness or weakness. Then he’d blow and it came in a frantic roar which made its way to the bookies hanging around the telephone box on the corner and had the Windmill girls holding their pretty beringed little fingers over their pretty little rhinestoned ears in mock shock and alarm.

It had been a red-letter day for Jackie when he had climbed aboard his bike and directed himself towards the club the hustling matchmaker Mr Solomons had made in that funny little building in Devonshire Street in Hackney, sevenpence in the balcony, one shilling downstairs, the big promoters in on Sunday mornings, sitting at the ringside eating kippers and watching the boxing. Jackie’s brief amateur career had ended with a suspension at fourteen for taking ten shillings for a bout in Chatteris. He had enjoyed a string of victories against small-timers for small pay at the Dev, and Mr Solomons was coming round to the opinion that there was something a bit right about Jackie. Only he couldn’t believe this boy skedaddling on his bicycle back home to the sticks every time without even seeing the inside of the new shower bath he had gone to such great lengths and nearly done his money (so he claimed) to install. So Jolly Jack had a notion. He put forward a plan.

Mr Solomons loved and doted on his aged mother who, when he was a year and a half, had joined the wagon trains of Jews with pushcarts leaving Eastern Europe and trundled him out of her marshes village in White Russia. Judah, Booba’s husband, had arrived first with other
landsmen
from the village, and had found employment in a rag factory, sorting rags, a filthy, terrible job, and then as a cap-maker in a workshop in the East End. He had been able to save enough money to rent two small rooms above a wardrobe-dealer in Pearl Street, Spitalfields, behind the
Cambridge
music-hall. A couple of years later they had moved a few streets north, to two rooms in a teeming, dark, three-storeyed tenement, only ever called ‘the Buildings’. There, Booba started to
take in work for Bryant and May’s, making matchboxes. Bryant and May supplied the labels and the pieces of cardboard. She had to buy the paste – flour and water and a bit of soap – out of what she earned. There were strips of sandpaper to stick on. The work was paid daily, and Jack or one of his brothers and sisters – in the final there were six of them: Jack, Maxie, Barney, Harriet, Asher and Cissie – would take the matchboxes into the receiving depot in Bacon Street for their mother. In later years, the girls would buy lace curtains in Caledonian Road and sell them or rent them for sixpence a week to the neighbours, but they never had more than the two rooms for all of them.

By the late forties and Jackie’s arrival, Judah Solomons was dead. Jack’s brothers and his sisters, like him, had taken a step up in the world and moved away from the old East End. Not very far away: only to the double-fronted houses and two-car garages of Stamford Hill and Hendon which they had decorated in the
new-style
goy
way. But, try as they may to persuade her, Booba had resolved to end her days in the Buildings and was determined that she couldn’t be budged. So, in truth, lodging Jackie with his mother was a very Jolly Jack way of filleting several herrings at the same time.