Up West (19 page)

Thanks to the likes of John Stephen, the first retailer in Carnaby Street to cater specifically to young, male fashionistas, blokes ditched the greys, blacks and browns
that had long dominated their wardrobe and broke out into brilliant colour. Girls and boys alike donned the eye-swivelling, swirly patterns of psychedelia: Carnaby Street and its patrons positively reeked of patchouli oil for a decade or so, and peace and love ruled. Local florists did well too. Echoes of the sixties remain in Carnaby Street, although today it is frequented by tourists rather than young people at the forefront of fashion.

Ronnie Mann's wife, Sandra, ‘can remember Carnaby Street starting, because I worked in Great Marlborough Street in the offices of Warwick Woollens. My aunt was a matcher, who worked for John Kavanaugh. She used to go round with the little samples, matching up materials they needed for certain things. That was just when Carnaby Street started. I can't remember what Carnaby Street looked like before all that happened. Just can't picture it. Just like Poland Street, one of those little Georgian side streets with ordinary shopfronts.'

Ronnie agrees that there was little to distinguish it. ‘When I first knew Carnaby Street, at the beginning of the fifties, it was just another side street. There was a big frame-maker's near there called Wheatley's, who were the cutting edge of technology and weird design, while we was all about tradition, so when we had a job that didn't suit us, I used to walk over there to them. It was just off Carnaby Street – Foubert's Place. Carnaby Street was an ordinary street, ordinary shops.'

Yet many of those ‘ordinary' shops in the West End had
extraordinary things going on in them. Mike O'Rouke's family had worked in Covent Garden market for generations, but as his father had lost his leg in a childhood accident, he could not do heavy work, and had to look further afield. ‘One of his jobs,' Mike remembers, ‘was up at Green Park station, working for a firm of taxidermists. He used to go in there of a Saturday morning, to open up and things like that. He quite often met the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh; they used to go in there to look at the exhibits and all that. It was quite funny, him coming home and saying, “Oh, the Queen popped in today.”'

Then there were the specialist shops selling unlikely goods, such as the tack shop in St Martin's Lane where you could buy a saddle, or Wisden's cricket shop in Great Newport Street, which sold everything to do with cricket – bats, balls, stumps, pads and scorebooks, as well as the famous year-book – in an area far from anywhere where it was safe to ride or you could find enough greenery to make a wicket.

Pollocks Toy Museum in Monmouth Street was a lovely fantasy world that sold toys; here you could simply marvel at the collection of Victoriana, such as the toy theatres. The Old Curiosity Shop, which inspired Dickens's novel, was near Lincoln's Inn Fields. And, opposite Freemasons' Hall in Great Queen Street, Toye, Kenning & Spencer sold Freemasons' regalia.

‘The oldest building in the West End was an Elizabethan house built in 1601 in Lower John Street,' Derek Hunt reminded me. ‘They used to repair watches there, repair clocks.'
He also remembered ‘The violin shop just by Duck Lane, at the end of Broadwick Street. You can tell from the building that before that it used to be the Butchers' Arms, a pub.' One of my own favourite shopfronts was the perruquiers (wig-makers) in lower Wardour Street, where, according to Derek again, there was an arch whose foundation stones were laid by Sarah Bernhardt and Henry Irving.

Owen Gardner, who spent his entire working life in retail, particularly remembers a specialist shop in Greek Street, Madame Cadec's. ‘She was a Frenchwoman, and she had a tiny, tiny shop, a little curio shop, things hanging from the ceiling and everything else, and she specialized in copperware. She would drive to France, buy bits and pieces, and bring them back and sell them in her shop. At Page's, we used to sell exactly the same copperware, but everybody went to her; she used to sell more copperware than we did, although we had a shop five times the size, because they thought it was something different. In actual fact, the copperware came out of the same factory in Birmingham.

‘But she was a lovely character, did things that we as a business couldn't do. She'd go and see the chef, and the chef would say, “I can't afford to buy any pans,” and she would ask what he could afford. He might say “A bag of potatoes” or something, so she would give him the two pans, but give a bill for a sack of potatoes. She worked there right up to the day she died. She had a heart attack driving back from crossing the Channel up to London, and ran off the road.'

Owen also reminded me about the tradesmen who
supported the retailers. One stuck in his mind, although not necessarily for the character of the shopfront. ‘There were all kinds of people in the West End who did signs for windows, and stuff like that. I always remember as a fairly young lad, I used to go in to this particular place that did all our window signs, for the sales and that, and in the back room it had pictures all over the wall of – I was going to say every star you could think of, but that would be an exaggeration – all in the nude; Marilyn Monroe, Diana Dors, all these people. I don't know where they got the photographs from, but they were all stuck up on the wall there.'

I remember some wonderful tiling in the shops in Soho, in butchers' shops particularly. Hammet's had lovely tiling. And I also liked the distinctive art deco lettering that picked out the name, ‘Benoit Bulke, butchers, charcutiers', at 27 Old Compton Street. The sign above Gamba was another favourite, largely because of the picture of a ballerina, but also because the lettering was so very distinctive. I always liked the huge and highly colourful harlequin suspended above the Parmigiani delicatessen, where my father had his shop. All these signs were welcome landmarks for me, telling me I was close to home in Old Compton Street. L'Escargot, the restaurant in Greek Street had a painted hanging sign outside of a man riding a snail. I loved it, because he looked so jolly and happy. Of course, the designers and craftsmen who created these, and many other, icons of my childhood were anonymous, which makes it all the sadder when their work disappears along with the shops that they adorned.

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When you are young – and especially when you were young in the decades before cars widened everyone's horizons – the local shops define who you are, become part of your identity. In Soho, they gave you a sense of rich possibility, of a much wider world, full of dreams and promises. Alberto Camisa summed it up best: ‘You could get absolutely everything you needed without crossing Regent Street, Shaftesbury Avenue, Charing Cross Road or Oxford Street: the candlestick maker, butcher, wig maker, everyone was there. There was a car showroom in Poland Street garage – Ford. The rich and the poor all came in together. There was a violin factory in Beak Street, and people who made gold braid for the army uniforms. Every trade had its corner, making and selling everything you can think of. I can't think of a trade that wasn't present in Soho. Except funeral directors. Soho was more for the living!'
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Die-sinkers make dies for striking coins, medals and the like.

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A mantle is the sleeveless coat that is the basis of many garments.

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The only funeral director in the West End was in Holborn, with a branch office in Covent Garden, not Soho.

Although – or perhaps because – there was far less traffic, the streets of the West End were rarely empty by night or day. As well as the crowds bustling their way from one place to another, there were people who made their living, and sometimes lived their lives, on the streets. Some relied on their talents (which could be vanishingly small) to earn a crust, others conducted retail businesses on the pavements – with or without a licence – while others relied on their wits, scamming and hustling passers-by to survive. Soho's streets,
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it seemed, had more than its share of all of them, adding to the unique atmosphere of the place.

There were a lot of buskers on the streets after the war.
Some of them had worked in music halls before they joined the forces, and found work hard to come by once they were back on Civvy Street. Others were displaced persons, unable or unwilling to return to their old, pre-war lives, who were trying to scratch a living while they thought about what to do next. They turned up in town centres all over the country, grinding out tunes on squeeze-boxes, washboards, spoons, fiddles or trumpets. Many wound up in London's West End, where there were so many cinema and theatre queues to entertain.

A relatively common sight in those days was a one-man band, with splash cymbals tied to the inside of his knees, a drum strapped to his back and drumsticks attached to his elbows to enable a steady thumping rhythm while his hands were occupied with a guitar or banjo and his mouth with a wind instrument – a harmonica or a tin whistle – attached to a neck harness. It was a logistical challenge to see just how many instruments they could festoon themselves with and what tune they could play that would incorporate at least a bar or two from all of them. The clatter made by one-man bands as they moved from one pitch to another had to be heard to be believed. There was no mistaking one on the move.

Late on a Sunday morning, the scratchy, tinny opening bars of ‘The Sheik of Araby' would announce the arrival of my favourite buskers in Old Compton Street. I believe they were called the Sons of the Desert, and if they weren't, then they should have been, on account of their fezzes. It's only now, thinking back, that I realize the probable significance
of those bright splashes of red that looked for all the world like upturned flowerpots, each with a single, natty black tassel. Before the Second World War, everyone wore a hat as a matter of course. Indeed, few would step out of their own front doors without their ‘titfer': it simply wasn't done. Men could choose between the cheesecutter (or flat cap), the trilby, the Homburg, the fedora or the bowler for day-to-day wear and in summer, the Panama or a straw boater. Their choice of headgear spoke volumes as to their class, occupation and aspirations. Although the subtle nuances of headgear and class have now been lost, in the late forties and fifties they were still instantly recognized by any British man, woman or child in the street.

A fez said kasbah, Araby, Egypt, the mysterious East and the desert. My favourite buskers were boxing clever; their startling headgear told passing prospective punters that they had fought and suffered alongside Monty in his North African campaigns. A fez proclaimed that its wearer was a seasoned ‘Desert Rat' – even if he wasn't – and the punters would approve, either because they'd been there, too, or had a son, a brother, a husband, a lover or a pal who had: this helped to loosen passers-by's grip on their small change.

A bright red fez also showed up well in the dim light of winter, or on a foggy day. It was exotic, and a spot of exoticism never went amiss when a body was trying to flog something that people didn't actually need, especially when times were hard and money short. People craved distraction from rationing, the atom bomb, poverty and the ‘make do
and mend' culture that had dominated their lives for so long. The Sons of the Desert provided all that with their street-level entertainment.

To my, admittedly unsophisticated, five-year-old eyes, they were wonderful, it was as simple as that. The music issued from the flaring horn of the old-fashioned (even then) hand-cranked gramophone that played the brittle, shellac 78s of the day. The needle that ran in the record's grooves was enormous, big enough to darn fishermen's socks. The precious gramophone had its own transport, in the form of a battered, black, well-sprung perambulator, which was pushed from pitch to pitch by one of the troupe. Sometimes there were seven of them, and occasionally as many as eleven. As well as their fezzes, the buskers wore ‘penguin suits', a kind of evening dress featuring a long tailcoat and pinstriped trousers.

Their act was a combination of acrobatics, silent comedy routines, and a sand dance – performed on genuine sand transported in an old fire bucket that hung from the pram handle. They kept all sorts of other props in the pram besides the gramophone, including ancient Egyptian headgear to complement what they fondly imagined to be the ancient Egyptian moves of the sand dance. They moved their heads backwards and forwards in time to the music in exactly the same way as amorous pigeons moved theirs as they strutted their stuff on our windowsill. Even today, I can't see pigeons moving that way without thinking of the Sons of the Desert and their sand dance.

The grand finale was always a human pyramid. At the very end of the show, the acrobats would tumble, in turn, starting from the very apex of the pyramid down to the ground, and finish off with a neat roll or a somersault. They never, ever, crashed in to their audience, however close or pressing it was. They never lost a fez either, even when they were upside down. I always wondered how they did that. My brother said they nailed them to their heads and I really believed him because, being four years older, he knew everything. Now that age has brought a little more wisdom, I reckon they must have had some sort of sticky tape.

‘Meg of the Gleaming Gums' was a name I coined for a small, round woman in a headscarf and ancient winter coat who sang badly, but operatically – in a fruity soprano – to queues in Leicester Square and Piccadilly. Others I spoke to remember her being able to hit all the notes, but not necessarily in the right order. The reflection of the famous Piccadilly Circus lights would flash on and off her toothless gums as she warbled her way through ‘We'll Meet Again' and ‘Danny Boy'.

Sometimes Meg was accompanied by Jumping Jack, a tall, lugubrious man with grizzled locks and long, skinny arms and legs. He wore an ill-fitting harlequin suit with diamond-shaped splashes of red, blue, yellow, green and white, and would caper about, dancing, wearing a mournful look and holding out a hat in his hand. He was Meg's ‘bottler', the collector of the all-important lolly.