Up West (21 page)

All sorts of men wound up in this unhappy band, including a High Court judge, the son of a peer of the realm, a one-time millionaire, a composer, an actor, musicians and show business people, a greengrocer, a dentist, teachers, clergymen, a doctor or two, a journalist, writers and artists. Each morning these poor souls would form a scruffy line to collect their boards from a place in Frith Street – or it may have been Dean Street. They'd then head for the main shopping areas like Oxford Street, Regent Street, Piccadilly, Leicester Square, Charing Cross Road or Shaftesbury Avenue to walk up and down, up and down until the shops closed and the shoppers headed home. Then the men would return to the yard, dump their boards and queue up again at a hatch to collect their day's pay. Sometimes, a man would be so overcome with thirst and the DTs that he'd dump his board and nip in to a pub for a stiffener, but he did so at his peril, because there were inspectors who did the rounds to make sure that their men were on the job.

Some individual street people have woven their way in to Soho folklore. The stories about Ironfoot Jack are legion. My own memory of him was that he was often drunk, sometimes
raving and a tiny bit scary if you were knee high and very young. He wore a cloak and a large hat and had a habit of climbing up on the roofs of cars to declaim dramatically about this and that. The iron foot played hell with the car's bodywork, but, not being the owner of any of the vehicles, Jack was indifferent. Such trivialities were beneath the ‘King of the Bohemians', as he dubbed himself, often from the top of a car.

‘Quick, let's dive in here,' Father would say if we saw Jack coming towards us. ‘What a dreadful schnorrer that bugger is!' We'd take swift and decisive evasive action to evade Jack's cadging.

Jack's iron foot fascinated me, partly because I'd never seen anything like it before – or since, for that matter – and partly because of the sparks. Being low to the ground, I got a good view of the foot in question. It was a built-up boot affair, to make up for Jack's short leg, with a typical shoe or boot arrangement in leather at the top, but the metal sole was a sort of platform with iron struts between the sole and the shoe part. When Jack was drunk, which was frequently, he'd drag the offending foot and sparks would fly, giving me an impromptu firework display.

Ironfoot Jack was mainly famous for the con tricks that he pulled. He advertised for people to send ten bob (some say it was a fiver, but that seems an awful lot for the times) to receive the secret of making money ‘by return of post'. When he got an enquiry, he'd reply promptly with the advice, ‘DO WHAT I DID . . .' Another scam was to advertise his patent
fly killer. Again, on receipt of five (or ten, depending on who told the story) shillings, he'd post back two small blocks of wood, one marked ‘A' and the other ‘B' and instructions to ‘Place the fly on block A and whack it hard with block B'.

The restaurant was one of his bolder efforts. He rented a semi-derelict building where the electricity had been cut off. Undaunted, Jack arranged to have paraffin lamps liberated from local night-watchmen, and lit the place with those. Impressive menus were provided, in French no less, to add a little class, but every item on them, bar one, was crossed out due to ‘shortages' and ‘rationing'. The one dish left was ‘poisson et pommes frites'. When the diners duly ordered, Jack would yell the order in to the non-existent kitchen and ‘a lad' would sprint down to the nearest chippie, grab the requisite portions of fish and chips, sprint back, dump them on plates and then Jack, with the great dignity of a seasoned
maître d'hôtel
, would serve them. Other sources say that Jack did the sprinting himself, but if this was so, there must have been a veritable blizzard of sparks and a terrible racket from the iron foot. Needless to say, the restaurant closed after a few, short weeks.

I realize now, looking back, that there was a knife-edge quality to Jack that I found frightening, because he was unpredictable. On the other hand, Father found that he was all too predictable in his endless search for handouts. Gary Winkler thought Jack ‘a great character' but Daniel Farson, in
Soho in the Fifties
, writes that ‘Ironfoot Jack's determination to rise above his shortcomings was admirable, but I found
him a dreadful old bore, and was far from certain that his story about the restaurant was true.' Possibly, scruffy old Jack didn't fit comfortably in to Farson's rather rarefied milieu of boozy and artistic friends.

The cries of ‘I gotta horse, I gotta horse!' echoed throughout the land in the fifties; or at least, those parts of the land that boasted a racecourse. Ras Prince Monolulu was a national character, by far and away the nation's best known and loved black man. His schtick was to claim that he was a tribal chief from Abyssinia or Ethiopia. Prince Monolulu was concerned less with strict adherence to the facts than with creating a mood, and to do that you have to get the imaginary landscape right. He dispensed tips on horses for a price, talked about racing endlessly and may have taken illegal street bets.

I remember the Prince as an imposing, but friendly, figure in an ostrich feather headdress. The long feathers stood straight up from his head and waved gently in the breeze, or wildly as he declaimed his wonderful spiel. This was followed by a monologue that meandered down the fascinating, and sometimes surreal, highways and byways of his fertile imagination, via a gentle joke or two at the expense of the white man's imagined ‘superiority'. He was the racecourse and street corner stand-up of his day.

Many a harassed mother had cause to sigh with relief when she spotted Prince Monolulu majestically holding court from his bench in Soho Square. He kept a benevolent eye on the local kids for their busy parents for free. While kids played hide-and-seek round the fake Tudor hunting lodge behind
him or rolled about squealing on the sooty grass at his feet, he would be selling the names of the ‘winners' at the 2.30 at Cheltenham, Epsom or Ascot.

It was an arrangement that suited everybody. Kids loved Prince Monolulu, or Peter Mackay to give the name that his parents handed down for him. His place of birth was not Abyssinia, nor indeed anywhere in Africa, but was most probably Guyana. The First World War had seen him interned in Germany, and on his release he decided that a change of country was definitely in order. He made his way across Europe, working variously as a male model, a fortune teller, a boxer and even briefly passed himself off as an opera singer.

His career as a racing tipster really took off when he won a massive £8,000 by backing Spion Kop at 100–6 in the Derby of 1920. Ever after, no race meeting of any note was complete without the sight of ostrich plumes waving in the breeze above the punters' heads and the cries of ‘I gotta horse, I gotta horse . . .' floating across the winners' paddock. Prince Monolulu died in 1965 at the age of eighty-four.

Timothy Cotter, sometimes known as ‘Phyllis', because he was quite effeminate, or ‘Rosie', because he habitually wore a rose behind his ear, didn't trouble with a sandwich board. He stuck to begging and running errands for his meagre living. Rosie had a despised rival, who also wore flowers, usually carnations and chrysanthemums as I recall, although any flowers would do, tucked behind
both
of his ears. I don't know the rival's name, but people often confused the two men.

Rosie's usual haunt was Berwick Street market, where, according to Janet Vance, kindly barrow boys more or less kept him going. Some donated bits of money here and there for a night in the dosshouse, hot meals and cups of tea when the weather was cold. Mostly, though, they gave him the slightly bruised fruit and vegetables that weren't quite fit for sale, on the grounds that hard cash could be exchanged for bottles of the booze that had brought him so low, whereas an orange or an apple could not: and anyway, they were more nourishing.

Rosie, in his cups, was a terrible screecher, and I sometimes found him quite frightening, because, like Ironfoot Jack, he often seemed very close to the edge. When he died, the
Daily Mirror
reported that ‘His endless kindness, especially to children, made him a very popular figure.' Personally, I don't remember him being particularly kind to children. I suppose it depended on just how drunk he was. I do know that he was barred from most of the local pubs, partly because he annoyed the customers by always being on the scrounge, even from complete strangers, and partly because he enjoyed creating a scene by screaming scurrilous comments from the doorways. These tirades would cease abruptly when he was hurled unceremoniously back out on the pavement.

Dan Farson once made the mistake of giving Rosie half a crown, although he came to regret it, because after that rash act of kindness, whenever Rosie saw him he'd shriek, ‘Mr Farson, Mr Farson, dear! Give me the price of a drink.' And when he was refused he'd add, ‘Oh, well, give me the kiss of life.'

Rosie's overt campness would not have worried Sohoites at all, but it would have deeply offended the strait-laced morality of the times. In the fifties, homosexuality was most definitely illegal, and the authorities decided on a crackdown that led to many arrests and trials. Sometimes Rosie would show signs of having been quite badly beaten. Word on the street was that the beatings occurred while he was in police custody, and this may well have been true on some occasions. In those days, the police force could get away with rough treatment of troublesome prisoners. It was a standing joke that Rosie's only known fixed address was the police station. I am also sure that some beatings took place in dosshouses when his sexuality had annoyed less understanding dossers, or on the street when he was so drunk that he was reduced to sleeping rough.

Eventually, Rosie's tough life took its toll. He died with neither friends nor known relatives. This meant a pauper's funeral, something that the Berwick Street traders, for whom he had become a wildly eccentric mascot, would not countenance. They decorated their stalls with pictures of Rosie and the flowers that he so loved, and had a whip-round in order to send him off in style. They collected enough money to do just that, and on the day of the funeral in excess of two thousand people arrived to bid a final farewell. The funeral procession brought the streets of Soho to a standstill, and men removed their hats to show their respect to one of Soho's legendary, if not necessarily well-loved, characters. ‘We won't see his like again,' the crowd murmured, according
to Dan Farson, who added, with truthful cynicism, that the newspapers and the crowd uttered all ‘the usual dishonest euphemisms when someone disconcerting dies'. It does seem that a fair few that nostalgia and recent history have deemed to be ‘characters' were, in fact, tragically ‘disconcerting'.

*
It's a quirk of naming that there are no ‘roads', ‘avenues' or ‘drives' in Soho, just a maze of streets and the very occasional lane, court, mews or square.

For Londoners, Up West is the place to go shopping when you really want to splurge, and it's been that way for a long time. Ever since Oxford Street was developed by the Earl of Oxford late in the nineteenth century, it has attracted a wide variety of shoppers, from the quite well off to those of much more modest means, while the elegant Georgian streets and arcades in the angle between Piccadilly and Regent Street have been the place to find shops selling the luxurious and the bespoke – jewellers and tailors, watchmakers and shoemakers.

In the years after the war, however, splurging wasn't high on most people's agenda. For most of the people who lived in the West End, shopping had little to do with ease and luxury; more often it was about looking for the necessities of life, and often not finding them. What a lot of us don't realize is that a great many people in the forties and early fifties were seriously hungry, thanks to shortages and rationing.

Sonia Boulter has never forgotten what hunger felt like. ‘I remember starving, literally starving, when I was a youngster. I was grateful for anything. I remember, after the war, my mum taking me to Berwick Street, and going round the back of a bombed area to see this woman, probably a sixty-odd-year-old woman, who was selling chickens from a cardboard box on the ground. They must have been black market. I can remember Mum picking around, having a look, trying to find a chicken. That sort of thing sticks in my memory. Food was very scarce, money was very scarce, and parents did what they had to do to feed the family.'

Something that anyone wanting to buy food had to do was queue. Everybody who lived through the years of rationing remembered standing in line. Nowadays people get cross if they're delayed a few minutes at the checkout, but in the forties the restrictions of rationing made endless queuing a way of life. ‘The fish queues were the longest,' Barbara Jones remembers. ‘You'd queue for hours at the fishmonger's in Chandos Place. I'd do two or three hours, then my sister would do two or three, only to find out there was No Fish Today.'

Something that made the queues longer was the fact that, during the war, shoppers had to register with certain nearby shops in order to prevent fraud, and were only allowed to use their ration books and coupons at selected places. It wasn't until rationing finally came to an end in 1954 that people could shop around for the cheapest or best offers, or for the shop that had what they wanted in stock. One-stop shopping
was rarely an option, either. Few grocery stores sold every rationed foodstuff. ‘We had to register at more than one grocer's,' Owen Gardner remembers. ‘We went to a shop in New Row, run by a Welsh milkman, but they didn't sell bacon, so we went to a wholesaler in St Martin's Lane for that. He had great big sides of it hanging up, and we used to have to go in and say, “Can I have my two rashers, please?” or whatever your ration was.'

Mike O'Rouke also remembers having to make the rounds. ‘I used to do the shopping for my mum when I was old enough, using ration books. She used to tear out a little coupon, give it to me and send me to the Home & Colonial and other shops up on the Dials. She just used to point me in a direction and say, “Here's a coupon, go up there and get that.”'