Young Winstone (2 page)

This wouldn’t have come as any great surprise in the Winstone household, because boxing was what the men in our family did. My granddad had been drafted into a Scottish regiment and stationed in Edinburgh for a while just to be on their boxing team, and when my dad did his National Service with the Royal Artillery, he spent virtually the whole three years in his tracksuit, boxing out of Shoeburyness. I think Henry Cooper might’ve been doing his stint at around the same time, and the only actual service I ever remember my dad telling me about was helping out after the great flood of 1953, when all those people died on Canvey Island.

He said he’d got really angry because the Salvation Army wouldn’t give him a cup of tea when he didn’t have the money to buy one. From then on if he ever saw someone selling
The War Cry,
he’d just tell ’em to go away. He had no time for those people whatsoever, to the extent that I even remember asking him about it once as a kid: ‘Surely there must be some good people in the Salvation Army, Dad?’ But he just told me, ‘Nah, son, they wouldn’t give me a cup of tea.’

Hopefully this has given you a bit of an introduction to the kind of men I grew up around. I’m going to have to go back a bit further in time for the women, because I came across a story recently which really answered a lot of questions for me about the way I think, and the way the women in my family live their lives. It all started when the Winstones got turned down by the BBC TV series
Who Do You Think You Are?

Now, I like that programme – I get right into it (although I have seen some boring ones) – but the first time they asked, I didn’t really want to do it. I enjoy watching them go through other people’s ancestors’ dirty laundry, but when it came to mine, I just didn’t really want to know. That’s all in the past, and it’s the future you want to be thinking about. They kept coming back to me, though, and in the end I thought, ‘Do you know what? Maybe it would be good to find out a few things.’

I knew I had a great-uncle Frank – my granddad’s brother on my mum’s side – who played centre-forward for West Ham. He was at Reading first, and then he moved to West Ham in 1923, the year they got to their first Wembley final. Maybe if they’d bought him before the big game instead of just after it, they might actually have won. As it happens, they got beat, and my great-uncle Frank was a kind of consolation prize, but still, I thought that might be a good starting point.

Unfortunately, it seems that on the show they stick to the direct bloodline, i.e. parents and children only, so an uncle can’t be the story, or at least that’s what they told me. And after giving due consideration to the mountain of material that their researchers had unearthed, they had come to the conclusion that the various roots and branches of the Winstone family tree were just too fucking boring to make a show out of. They were lovely about it – ‘Sorry, Ray, but there’s nothing in here we can use’ – and I did get the giggles on the phone. That can’t have been an easy call to make: ‘Listen, Fatboy, there’s just nothing interesting about you or your family.’

It’s funny looking back, but I was quite depressed about it for a while – not depressed so I wanted to kill myself, just a bit disappointed and choked up. But then I sat down and went through some of the stuff they’d dug up, and I actually got really enlightened by it.

The one thing that did come out of
Who Do You Think You Are?
was that both branches of my family had been East Londoners for as far back as they could trace. Right the way back to the 1700s my mum’s side came from Manor Park/East Ham and my dad’s from Hoxton and the borders of the City.

OK, my family never changed the world. They never invented penicillin or found the Northwest Passage or won a VC at the Siege of Mafeking. They were basically just people who sometimes fell on hard times and ended up in the poorhouse for a couple of weeks – or longer. But there was one extraordinary thing about them, as there is about any family that’s still around today, and this was that they survived. On top of that, it turned out we did have one story worth telling after all, because some time afterwards the same TV company came back to me and said they were making another show that they did want me to be a part of. The subject? There’s a thick ear for anyone who’s guessed it: asylums.

The researchers had discovered that my great-great-grandmother (on my dad’s side) was originally married to a Merchant Navy man called James Stratton, who ended up in the old Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum at Friern Barnet. That was somewhere I’d end up too a century and a bit later, albeit for slightly different reasons – I was shooting the movie version of
Scum
– but poor old seaman Stratton had got syphilis.

I didn’t find out until we were researching the programme – they like the historians and other experts to break the news to you as you’re going along, so they can catch you looking surprised – just how rife syphilis was in Victorian London. Even before that, going back to Hogarth’s time in the eighteenth century, all those wigs they were wearing in his paintings weren’t just fashion accessories, they were there to cover the fucking scars.

One strange thing that happened was that at one point it actually became fashionable to be syphilitic, so people would wear false noses and ears to make it look like they had it when they didn’t. Wearing a false nose to show you were a proper geezer – how nutty was that? No crazier than covering yourself in tattoos or having plastic surgery you don’t medically need, I suppose.

As far as the unfortunate Mr Stratton was concerned, they thought he’d probably picked the syphilis up in the Navy, before he was married, but then he might have had a dabble again, because the sixth of his eight children was born with it too. Either way, he died a terrible death, leaving my great-great-grandmother alone with all those kids, and no real means of support – visible or invisible.

At this point in the story, the odds must’ve been on her drifting into prostitution. That’s certainly what I thought was going to happen. Because all these events were unfolding around Whitechapel, and the name she went by at the time, Hannah Stratton, had a
familiar ring to it – like Mary Kelly or one of those other tragic victims – in my head we were heading towards Jack the Ripper territory. Obviously the programme-makers don’t tell you what’s going to happen because they want you to cry. In fact, they want that so badly they’re practically standing behind the camera with a big bowl of freshly chopped onions.

They’d taken me to Christ Church, Spitalfields, the big white church opposite the market my dad used to take me to as a kid when he was in the fruit and veg game. I didn’t remember ever having been inside before – me and my family not being churchy kind of people, and in any case it was boarded up and virtually derelict for most of the sixties and seventies – but it looks amazing now it’s all been restored. So I’m standing there in this beautiful place, waiting for the bad news about Hannah getting gruesomely done in by the Ripper, and then they tell me that it was in this church that she married her second husband.

It turned out that Stratton wasn’t actually my great-great-grandfather at all, because Hannah managed to marry again within a year of his death. She would probably have been ostracised at first because of the syphilis, and could easily have headed for the nearest gin palace and ended up in the gutter somewhere, but instead she thought, ‘Fuck it, I’m fighting for my kids.’ So she stood her ground and her neighbours rallied round to help her – which was incredible in itself, because that kind of thing doesn’t happen so much today, at least not in cities, where no one tends to know who the people living next door to them are any more.

After Hannah remarried and became Mrs Durham, she and her new husband lived round the corner from Christ Church – for a while, and then moved to West Hackney. Her syphilis became dormant and she had more kids, so that was when my granddad’s
father was born. Her second husband had only been twenty-seven when they married – effectively a toyboy, and she never marked his card about exactly how old she was. So, while he thought she eventually died at the ripe old age of sixty-one, it was probably a good bit riper than that.

You couldn’t blame her for dangling the carrot a bit, though, given that she had kids to look after. And if she hadn’t done it, I wouldn’t be here today, so it was a happy ending for me as well. (And for the programme-makers, because Hannah’s story did make me cry. It broke my heart, to be honest, but it also made me very proud of her, and glad I’d done the show as now I can pass the story on down through my family to make sure she’s not forgotten.)

All in all, Hannah Durham was an amazing old girl, and I could see a lot of the characteristics of my sister Laura and my auntie Irene, my dad’s sister, in her. Not that either of them have ever had syphilis, but I’ve got a lot of strong women in my family. Obviously my mum’s is a different line, but it’s the same on her side as well. We’ll get to my maternal grandma and her three husbands in the next chapter . . .

In the meantime, the long and the short of it is that the men in my family seem to like marrying strong women, probably because we need them to keep us in line. But the other thing I realised standing in that old Hawksmoor church – and I know this might sound overly romantic, a bit pony even – was the depth of my family’s connection to the area.

My dad was born in Hoxton. You could definitely hear the bells of St Mary-le-Bow on Cheapside from there, so that makes him a proper cockney. And as I’ve said, the family had been basically there or thereabouts since the 1700s, until his generation started to move away in the late sixties. Yet now, just a few decades later, I’ve got
cousins in Dunmow, Braintree, Watford, Bushey, but there’s none of us left inside the M25: we’ve all got let out for good behaviour. How and why that change came about, and what it meant to us and to others, is one of the main subjects of this book.

I still think of myself as an East Londoner rather than a Londoner. And as I was driving in to do that filming in Spitalfields from where I live now, out in Essex, I seemed to pass places that had some relevance to mine or my family’s lives every few hundred yards from Whipps Cross onwards. None of the actual people are there any more, but that doesn’t make the memories any less vivid. It might even bring them through more strongly – after all, you don’t need to remember things that are still happening.

We were a big old tribe, and when I was a kid we used to have a big get-together more or less every Sunday, but now we’re much more dispersed, and the unit has kind of contracted much more to immediate family. My cousins all keep in touch, but I’ve been guilty of letting that go a bit in recent years. The way people perceive you is part of it as well. You start living in a bigger house and they’ll tell you, ‘Oh, we went past yours the other day’, so you’ll say, ‘Well, why didn’t you fucking knock on the door?’ But if the door’s behind a security gate, then the fact that they don’t knock on it is as much your fault as anyone else’s, isn’t it?

Looking back now, I can clearly see the staging posts by which the old closeness started to leave us. When my mum and dad brought me back from Hackney Hospital in the winter of 1957 (the building’s still there, up on Homerton High Street – I think it was the tall Victorian-looking wing to the east, not the lower section where the entrance is – but last time I looked they’d turned it into a nuthouse in my honour), they didn’t have a home of their own yet. From what I’ve gathered, there was never any question but that the three of us
would stay in the flat in Shore Place with my dad’s parents for a little while after my birth.

At a time when families would generally stay in the same place, nans and granddads were the nucleus of everything – everyone else would circulate around them. Now they just tend to get left where they are when everyone moves away, and then you see ’em when you can. It’s no wonder they get a bit grumpy. I feel lucky to have grown up at the tail-end of the old way of doing things, because the world of my childhood could not have wished for a better focus than my granddad Charles – Toffy they called him, I suppose because he was a bit of a toff – and Nanny Maud.

He was a real one-off, my grandfather; an old-fashioned gentleman. I’m sure a lot of people say that about their grandparents, but in this case it was definitely true. Toffy was a short, wiry man who always dressed immaculately and never forgot to lift his hat to the ladies as he walked down the road. By all accounts – at least, all accounts of his own – he was the man behind the modernisation of tic-tacking (the complex sign language for communicating bookmakers’ odds which you used to see John McCririck doing on the telly, until Channel 4 Racing gave him the Spanish – as in Spanish Archer, the El Bow). I think he definitely simplified it, him and another fella . . . there’s always another fella.

Nanny Maud was a similarly upright individual. I think she’d run a café as a younger woman, but by the time I came along everyone called her ‘The Schoolteacher’, because she had a lovely proper way of talking. She wasn’t all gorblimey, she was much more ‘telephone voice’. Even nowadays, when you meet the really old East London boys and girls, I find they have that almost Dickensian style of speaking which is nothing like how I sound. There’s still an accent, but it’s all very clipped and correct, and it’s a beautiful thing to hear.

I don’t have any specific recollections of sharing a home with Toffy and Maud as a child, because we moved out of there when I was about a year old. But some of my happiest early childhood memories are of the days when Maud would take me to the toy shop in Mile End – just by the junction where they’ve put that silly grass roof over the main road – and buy me Airfix kits, or the Batmobile with a Bat-boat that fired little rockets out the back. And in my teens I’d actually end up living with my granddad for a year, which would turn out to be one of the most influential, as well as the funniest, times in my life.

Hospitals take away as well as giving, and in my early teens Nanny Maud would die in the same place I’d been born. She had a fall and never quite got over it, and I don’t think the family could ever forgive Hackney Hospital for the feeling that a bit more could’ve been done. I was a kid on the cusp of being a young man by that stage, and I remember the sombre, grown-up mood of the family gathering in the Jackdaw & Stump – the pub just along the high street from the hospital – when everyone had come up to visit Nan together after her fall.