Up West (46 page)

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?'

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Two of the three robbers responsible for murdering de Antiquis were hanged, and the third escaped the rope because he was aged just seventeen.

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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'.

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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.'

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 the 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.

 

 

 

 

 

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.

Peter Jenkins
was born in West London. His father got a job as Superintendent of a Peabody Trust housing estate in Wild Street, and the family moved there in 1947, when Peter was four. His mother had grown up in the area. Peter went to St Clement Danes school. The family moved out of the West End when Peter's father switched to a new estate in 1956.

Barbara ‘Bobbie' Jones
was born in 1936 and grew up in John Adam Street, near the Adelphi, where her parents worked for a firm of coal factors, her mother as a housekeeper and her father as an accountant; her mother was also a knitwear designer. In 1955, the family moved around the corner to Buckingham Street. She went to school at St Clement Danes and then the Greycoat School in Victoria before going to university. She married a London fireman,
Roy Walker
, who also contributed some memories to the book. Roy died in 2008.

Pat Jones
was born in 1933 and, after returning from evacuation in 1943, was at St Clement Danes for a year before going on to the City of London School for girls and, in 1947, Bloomsbury Technical College to learn millinery. From 1949 to 1954 she worked at a costumier's in the West End, before giving up millinery because of problems with her eyes. She then worked in a local tobacconist's and a hairdresser's, and left the area following her marriage – in St Martin-in-the-Fields – in 1955.

Ann Lee
was born in 1946 and spent the first twenty years of her life living in the Peabody Trust buildings in Wild Street, where her grandmother, aunts and uncles also had flats. She went to school at St Clement Danes, then on to Millbank and Starcross secondaries. Her father worked at Boots across the river in Stamford Street, and her mother had various cleaning jobs. Ann left school at fifteen and worked in the area until she was married, in 1967.

Ronnie Mann
's mother went in to labour during an air raid in 1942, and was removed to Guildford, making Ronnie the only one in his family not to be born in Covent Garden. He grew up on the Peabody Trust Estate at Bedfordbury, and went to St Clement Danes and St Martin's schools before finding work on the market. In the early sixties he joined the Mann family picture-framing business in Monmouth Street, next to the Nucleus Coffee bar.

Mike O'Rouke
was born in 1944 and grew up at 14 Shelton Street, next door to the Mercer's Arms pub. The O'Rouke family had been Covent Gardeners for several generations,
working in the market and the grocery trade. Mike went to St Joseph's School in Macklin Street, then to a grammar school in Shepherd's Bush. After school he worked for his uncle, James Keith, who had five betting shops in Covent Garden.

Jackie Trussler
was in the same class at St Giles as Patricia Taylor. From the age of three, she lived in council flats with her mother and aunt, at first in Museum Street, then in Gower Street. When her mother remarried in the early sixties, Jackie moved with her to her stepfather's pub at King's Cross.

Margaret Connolly
,
Mel Edwards
and
Angela Rash-brooke
also supplied accounts of their childhoods in the West End.