Up West (33 page)

Raye confirmed this. ‘I done a bit of this and a bit of that, you know, got into a lot of bad ways, got on the dope scene,
basically because Gene Krupa was supposed to have taken the gear, and I was such a disciple of his, that what he did was not wrong. There was four of us that hung about, me, Ginger Baker, Phil Seamen and Dicky deVere.' Raye and Ginger eventually got off junk, but the laconic Seamen, widely regarded as the finest drummer Britain ever produced, didn't. His addictions to narcotics and booze hastened his death, aged forty-six, in 1972. Seamen's long demise affected all who witnessed it. Gary Winkler, who described Seamen as ‘a good friend when he wasn't out of it,' also knew Dicky deVere. ‘He was another fabulous drummer, bless his heart, but was on heroin. Eventually, he had an operation and then became like a child, you know, he couldn't play.'

Although heroin was a problem with some jazz musicians, its use was not widespread, whereas ‘speed' was everywhere. Musicians and punters alike took Dexedrine and ‘blues' (aka purple hearts) or chewed the wads from Benzedrine inhalers (prescribed for asthmatics), washed down with Coca-Cola. They did it not so much to get high as to stay alert, and not to miss any excitement. ‘After the music in the 2I's basement stopped for the night,' Andy Pullinger remembers, ‘we would go to all-night coffee bars. We took purple hearts to stay awake. We went to the Macabre, in an alleyway off Wardour Street. It was done up with coffins, skeletons, spiders' webs and other witches' accessories. Not much to do there except talk and snog. Another one was at the end of a lane between Berwick and Wardour Streets, which had jukebox music till dawn. We would stay there until six in the morning, then go
to a second-floor coffee bar near Charing Cross Road for breakfast.'

The blues and R&B ‘all-nighters' of the late fifties and early sixties were also sustained by pills. ‘The Flamingo all-nighter was paradise for me on a Saturday night,' remembers Victor Caplin. ‘We would be turfed out at about eleven-thirty only to line up and pay again to get back in for the late night session, blocked on a handful of purple hearts and dressed up to the nines in the current “stylist” fashion to listen to R&B. Black American airmen stationed at Lakenheath or Mildenhall would frequent the place, and it was our first real live exposure to the culture that these bands emulated and we aspired to.'

Drugs were available in the clubs or, if you had the contacts, at doctors' surgeries across Oxford Street and around Harley Street. Failing that, there was the street. As Raye Du-Val points out, ‘On every corner you had a bunch of guys, talking, doing something shady. We had Soho Sid, the Persian Yid, a right character, fag hanging out of his mouth . . .'

Some of the musicians were not averse to moving things on themselves. Raye tells how he came out of his flat one day and saw a poster on a news-stand saying,
SOHO DOPE PEDDLER CONFESSES ALL.
‘“I wonder who that is?” I thought. I bought the paper, and it was me!' Raye had been injudicious when talking to a young lady who, unknown to him, was a reporter.

If supplies of amphetamines failed, there was always Preludin, widely prescribed as a slimming pill, or, failing that,
Raye believed that baking Valium tablets changed their nature from a tranquillizer to a stimulant. And, of course, there was marijuana, the archetypal drug of the sixties. When the police raided Club Eleven in 1950, that was what they were looking for. ‘I can remember going down to Club Eleven to smoke,' Leo Zanelli remembers, ‘and it sometimes made me feel a bit sick, and sometimes mildly happy. Virtually all the weed – marijuana they called it then – came wrapped up in dark green greaseproof paper. To get it, you had to know someone. You had to ask someone, and it would come to you. A feller called Lefty used to flog a lot of it.

‘All the musicians were on it. As far as I know, there wasn't any of them who weren't. I stopped smoking in 1953, because two of my mates from Elephant & Castle died of ODs of something and that scared everyone off everything.'

For most people, though, youthful excitement was all it took. ‘I loved it in Soho,' remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘I was down Ken Colyer's club – traditional jazz, down in Little Newport Street – when I was still at school in 1956. I started going when I was fourteen, well below age. My brother and sister used to go; my sister was in her twenties, and I'd go with them. I went to the 2I's coffee bar, Le Macabre, Heaven & Hell; if you were having difficulty with money, they were the places you went to when you were trying to meet girls. I also went to the 2I's Jazz Club in Gerrard Street, on the corner. That was a proper Trad jazz club, came before the coffee bar. Yeah, I bloody lived in Soho. I was there about six nights a week, I suppose. I loved the jazz clubs. I loved it all.'

*
All quotes from Laurie Morgan and his wife, Betty, are taken from the TV documentary
Smoky Dives
(2001). Transmitted BBC4 in 2007.

*
Quote taken from
Skiffle: The Definitive Inside Story
(1997).

*
‘Skiffle', a word that originally referred to impromptu jazz parties in twenties America, was the name applied to a style of music in which American folk, blues and jazz tunes were performed, usually with great zest and attack, by young English men (and occasionally women). Skifflers tended to bash out the tunes on cheap acoustic guitars and some often rudimentary home-made instruments, including a ‘tea-chest' bass and a metal washboard – played using a handful of metal thimbles – instead of a drum kit.

*
Who went on to have a long career as a children's TV presenter, as a foil for Pussycat Willum, and a radio broadcaster.

*
www.classiccafes.co.uk

If people from other parts of London treated the West End as a kind of playground, coming Up West to shop and to visit the theatres, restaurants, cinemas, nightclubs and opera houses, most of the native Covent Gardeners and Sohoites tended to look elsewhere for their entertainment.

Certainly the spicier aspects of the West End's nightlife seemed to have little interest for the locals, as Alberto Camisa remembered. ‘There were two sides. There were the residents, who were law-abiding and well behaved, and then there was the nightlife, the strip clubs, Revuebar, Sunset Strip, all of that. In the evening, my parents stayed at home. If it was still sunny, June or July, you might pop out for a walk, but if you had kids with you, you didn't go for a drink. I wasn't allowed out on my own in the evening. It was a traditional continental sort of thing; the evenings were for family. At a certain time you ate, did your homework, and then you went to bed. We
didn't even have a TV until just before they landed on the moon.'

For some, it wasn't simply a question of coming up with the cash for a night out. Olga Jackson was forbidden various clubs and dance halls by her father because it would be embarrassing for him, as a policeman, if she were picked up there in a raid, while for the teenage Ann Lee, nightlife in general was off-limits. ‘I used to have to be in at half-past nine during the week. Even when I was engaged, at eighteen, I still had to be in at eleven during the week. If my fiancé got me in late, he used to get into trouble.'

Ann's solution was to call on the help of her grandmother, Cissie Glover, who lived downstairs. ‘She was a real character, my nan. She was handy to have around, because as well as not being allowed in to certain places, I wasn't allowed to wear certain things, so I used to stash my winkle-picker shoes down my nanny's flat, along with my make-up. I'd say to Mum, “See you later,” and go to Nanny's and get my shoes on, put my bit of make-up on. When I used to get in at night, I had to run in to Nanny's first, change my shoes and wash the make-up off.'

This ruse served Ann very well for a while. ‘Then, one day, my mum cleaned out Nanny's tallboy, found the shoes, found a pencil skirt, found the make-up. When I got in, she had them all on the kitchen table so I could see 'em, and said, “Don't say a word. They're all going in the bin.” And they did. So I went and got more, and said to Nanny, “Don't let her find them again!” The skirt used to get rolled and put in
a shoebox with the shoes and make-up and laid in the bottom of the wardrobe. Mum didn't find them again.'

The boys had it easier than the girls, of course, although Owen Gardner's mother had one strict rule: ‘She told me I wasn't allowed to go to the pictures on Sunday. She used to say you've got six other days of the week to go to the cinema. Of course, I did go sometimes. “Where have you been, Owen?” “Well, I've been around . . .”'

For young men, the West End held dizzying possibilities. John Carnera remembers a typical weekend in his late teens and early twenties. ‘Six of us used to run together: me, Peter Enrione, Henry Camisa and John Solari were Italian, or of Italian extraction, Percy Christopher – a nephew of Danny La Rue, Danny Carroll that was – was of Irish extraction, and the other one was Hans Dieter Maurer, and he was German. His aunt ran Maurer's Restaurant in Greek Street, which had a big spotted cow in the window – I'll never forget it. Apparently it was quite a top-class German restaurant, which is kind of surprising after the war.

‘On Friday night, we would start in the Helvetia, next door to Kettners, the restaurant, in Old Compton Street. We used to have a drink there, meet all our mates, then go on down the club, have a few hours down there, [wryly] see if we could pull any birds. And then about midnight or one o'clock, somebody would say there was a party going on, and we'd all troop off down to Eel Pie Island, on the Thames at Twickenham, down Streatham way, up to Hampstead, wherever there was a party. My mother wouldn't see me back
again until probably Sunday. God knows what happened in between. I can't remember.'

To some extent, John's ‘lost weekends' followed a family tradition. He tells me that his Uncle Primo used to tour the world as a wrestler after the Second World War. ‘One of the stops was always England, and he'd always stay in London at the Regent's Palace Hotel or the Strand Palace Hotel. He used to come and see us once a year, every year, in Soho. My mother used to hate it: her head would go in her hands and she'd start crying when she heard he was arriving. My uncle was very strong on the drink, so he'd take my dad out and we wouldn't see him for two or three days. By the time my dad came back, he looked about ten years older, 'cause my uncle was a fearsome drinker. He used to take my dad out on the piss for a couple of days on the spin, and my mum knew she'd have to pick up the pieces when he got back.'

Although, as Alberto Camisa pointed out, the great majority of the residents rarely frequented drinking clubs, strip clubs or nightclubs, pubs were a different matter. There were plenty of street-corner pubs in the West End, more than there are now. Some of the local hostelries catered mainly for the theatre crowd, gay men or other visitors, but there were others, tucked away in side streets or on street corners, that the residents could more or less call their own ‘We used to go to the Mercer's Arms, next door,' Mike O'Rouke remembers. ‘Everyone knew everyone in there. It was like the Rovers in
Coronation Street
. We used to play darts and that. It was very much a local: you used to get a few of the stars from
the Cambridge Theatre go in there, but mostly it was people from the surrounding streets.'

‘My father was a great pub man,' remembers Owen Gardner. ‘He went to the pub next door, the Cranbourn. My mother knew that as soon as he said he was going next door for a drink, she wouldn't see him again until closing time. He didn't drink a lot, but he was a good conversationalist. He'd go there, and he'd meet people – one regular, Ulrica Forbes, did the drawings of Charles and Anne when they appeared on National Savings stamps when they were children. She was always in there.'

Ann Lee's father was a regular, but not frequent, pub-goer. ‘Dad used to go for a drink on a Sunday lunchtime, because he worked six days a week. He'd go up the pub about half-past twelve, and he'd be in at two for his dinner. Sometimes, if the family came down, they'd all go up the pub together. They used to drink in the Prince of Wales.'

The Prince of Wales was the local not only for the Lee family, but also for the Freemasons at the nearby Masonic hall. Cultural clashes between the Masons and the less inhibited locals occasionally caused problems. ‘I must have been sixteen or seventeen,' Ann remembers. ‘I used to call in on Nan every morning before I went to work, just to give her a kiss and say, “See you later,” and she said “You'll never guess what happened to me – but don't tell your mother. Last night I had a couple of Guinnesses and I was singing, and those bloody Freemasons got me slung out.”

‘I was fuming all day, so on the way home from work, I
went in to the pub, and said to the landlord, “How dare you?” “What are you talking about?” he said. “How dare you chuck my nan out of this pub that she's been drinking in for years because of those weirdoes?” I really had a go. “She won't be drinking in here any more. She don't need your bloody pub,” I said.

‘I told Nan to go to the Sugar Loaf, said they would be all right in there, and she never went to the Prince of Wales again. My mum found out about a year later. She went in the Prince of Wales, and the landlord said, “Cor, your daughter's a fine mare, ain't she, coming in here wiping the floor with me?” and my mum said, “What? My Ann? My angel?” So she asked him what it was about, and he told her. She said to me, “How dare you show me up?” and I said, “What do you mean, show you up? You didn't even know.” Mum really had a go at my nan, though.'

Like many women of her generation, Cissie Glover was fond of a fortifying bottle of stout or two. ‘At six o'clock,' remembers Ann, ‘you'd see Nanny go out with her little hat on and her little coat, tripping out the gates and going up the road for her Guinness. Because she'd lived there so long, people would see her and say, “Hello Ciss, how are you? Have a drink, love.” Sometimes on a Sunday – not evening time – after people had been buying her drinks, she'd walk in to the gate of the flats and all of a sudden you'd hear her singing “Knees up Mother Brown”, and then she'd shout out, “Kitteee!” and my mother would say to me, “Oh my gawd. Get down those stairs quick and get her indoors.” So I had to
run down the stairs and say, “Come on, Nan, let's get inside.” I had to sing “Knees up Mother Brown” with her all the way across the grounds to get her indoors, otherwise she wouldn't move.