London Calling (10 page)

Quentin Crisp has lived for thirty-five years in Chelsea in one room without ever cleaning it. Now in the winter of his life
he describes himself on his Income Tax forms as a retired waif. In the past he has been unsuccessfully an illustrator, a writer,
a televisionary and is currently an artists’ model. His hobby is taking the blame.
³

Despite vicious treatment from a vociferously homophobic society, Crisp remained a beacon of courage and individuality, and
never gave up on people: ‘I’ve spread my love horizontally, to cover the human race, instead of vertically, all in one place.
It’s threadbare, but it covers.’
⁴

Soho embraced many different social scenes that did not necessarily
overlap. And they all had their gathering places. For example, at the west side of Soho, almost on Piccadilly Circus, was
the S & F Grill at 6 Denman Street, a coffee shop much frequented by actors and producers in the years just after the war.
It was situated in Shaftesbury Buildings, an elegant 1898 structure with marble columns on the frontage. Inside was bright
and modern and served good coffee, something of a rarity in those days, but toasted sandwiches were the safest bet as far
as food was concerned. Though the regulars assumed that ‘S & F’ stood for Stage and Film, it was in fact named after its owner,
Stan Freeman, who allowed young hopefuls to sit for hours nursing an empty coffee cup in front of them, hoping to be discovered
or at least befriended by one of the big names like Robert Morley who often came in. Digby Wolfe and Harry Fowler – who had
already appeared in ten movies by 1947 – were regulars, as was Diana Dors, who lived close by in Jermyn Street with her boyfriend
Michael ‘Kim’ Caborn-Waterfield. She and Kim liked to spend their afternoons there, fooling around with Fowler and Wolfe.
Dors, then seventeen, was already making films:
The House at Sly Corner
was her first, in 1946, when she was a fifteen-year-old. Her friend Pete Murray, later a well-known TV disc jockey, came
in every day, even though he lived out of town, and sometimes stayed over at her flat. The S & F closed at 6 p.m. and Dors
and Kim, Fowler, Wolfe and the others would transfer themselves across the street to a small drinking club called the White
Room.

Just around the corner from Denman Street was the Windmill Theatre on Windmill Street, famous as the strip joint that ‘never
closed’ during the war. Nudity onstage was forbidden by law, but in order to accommodate art schools and art studios, nudity
was permitted provided the models didn’t move. Club owners adapted to these absurd rules by creating acts where the stripper
would freeze when the last garment dropped or a seedy MC would drag the curtains back to reveal a static tableau of naked
girls. But the girls couldn’t keep still that long, and there were often plainclothes men or some uptight Christian moralist
in the audience just waiting to bust them, so the nudity was alternated with music and live comedy.

The strip clubs alternated the strippers with comedy acts and some of Britain’s finest performers got their start in these
venues, among them the comedian Harry Secombe. In the army during the war, performing for the troops, Secombe had developed
a comedy routine where he would dash onstage apologizing to the audience: ‘Sorry I’m late – I haven’t even shaved yet.’ Then
he would begin to shave, imitating a whole range of different people so that by the end of his act the stage was awash with
soapy water and the audience was roaring with laughter. Once out of the service, he
performed as a comedy singer on a part-time basis. Then, in 1946, he auditioned his shaving act at the Windmill. The theatre’s
manager, Vivian Van Damme, was notoriously hard to please but Secombe gave it his best and was afterwards called to Van Damme’s
office. Secombe:

I didn’t know what to expect, but as I walked in he just said to me ‘How much do you want a week?’ I remembered the advice
that Norman Vaughan had given me to ask for more than you expect and then you could always come down. So I asked for 40-quid
and he said ‘Alright’.
⁵

Harry was given a three-month contract and was able to turn professional.

It was at the Windmill that he met the comedian Michael Bentine, who in turn introduced him to Spike Milligan. After sharing
the stage with mostly naked girls, Secombe went out on the road in variety but his act was not always well received by theatre
owners; when one of them paid him off after the show he said: ‘You’ll not work my theatre again. In future you’ll shave in
your own time and not in mine!’ In November 1946, Secombe made his first billed TV appearance. He teamed up with the radio
scriptwriter and agent Jimmy Grafton who was also the owner of the Grafton Arms, now known as the Strutton Arms, at 2 Strutton
Ground, off Victoria Street, Westminster. It was here that Secombe, Bentine and Milligan met another like-minded comic, Peter
Sellers. The pub has gone down in the history of British comedy because it was there that the four of them came up with a
brilliant idea for a radio comedy programme. When it first went on the air on 28 May 1951 it was called
Crazy People
, but on 22 June 1952 the BBC let them change the title to
The Goon Show
, making all four of them famous and becoming a vital influence on British comedy. Bentine was the first to leave – in November
1952 – but the other three continued throughout the fifties until 28 January 1960, when the final episode, ‘The Last Smoking
Seagoon’, was broadcast. This anarchic, surrealist and very British humour has permeated British comedy ever since.

Around the corner from the Windmill, a few doors from the S & F Grill, was the Caribbean Club, at 12 Denman Street. This was
a West Indian club on the second floor of a building filled with small drinking clubs above the Argentina Restaurant. You
had to ring a bell and a shutter would slide open to inspect you, like in a speakeasy. The club was opened in May 1944 and
quickly gained 3,000 members. Non-members were firmly turned away. It was open from 3 p.m. until 11 p.m. and consisted of
a lobby bar and a dining room
where check-clothed tables surrounded a small dance floor with a bandstand at one end. The bar was crowded, mostly with whites
and a scattering of black GIs and East End pimps, while the small dance floor was used mainly by West Indians, dancing to
the music of the Dick Katz Trio: double bass, electric guitar and piano. The owner-manager, Rudi Evans, explained: ‘My band
has got plenty of life but I don’t allow drums. Drums mean trouble. They’re a dangerous drug in a place like this.’
⁶
Evans was born in Panama of French colonial extraction. He had been a singing teacher on the Continent and had acted in films
in France, Belgium and Britain, at one time playing alongside Paul Robeson, who must have been an influence on him. He was
described by George Melly as ‘one of those between the war blacks whose English was exaggeratedly Oxbridge, whose clothes
were excessively formal, and who once a night would sing, in the rich baritone of Paul Robeson, such sophisticated night club
ballads as “East of the Sun and West of the Moon”’. Melly would sometimes join in and sing a blues; he was deeply influenced
by Bessie Smith at that time and, as he wrote, he was ‘tolerated by the clientele’ for his ‘gauche sincerity’.
⁷

Tambimuttu, in his memoirs remembered: ‘Rudi… the proprietor always sang Jean Sablon’s “J’attendrai” for me, his moon face
glowing in the half dark.’
⁸
Tambimuttu enjoyed dancing at the Caribbean Club and his antics were described by his secretary Helen Irwin, who sometimes
accompanied him there, as ‘solo performances, short and arbitrary’, based on the Keralan war dance of Kathakali and involving
many little jumps and a heavy frown. ‘He danced eyes closed, and alone, remarkable because in those days ballroom dancing
consisted entirely of couples.’
⁹
Johnny Minton was also a habitué who liked to sit and muse during the late-afternoon hours when the club was empty and quiet.
For him it was a refuge.

The Rockingham was another example of clubs of the period, a discreet gay club in Archer Street started in 1947 by Toby Roe,
a man of impeccable taste. Having grown up in the country he never bothered to lock his premises until one day he heard people
moving about downstairs in the middle of the night. They were unable to find the light switch and left without taking anything.
Toby looked around for a door key but couldn’t find it, so he decided to nail the door shut until the morning. Unfortunately
this attracted the attention of a passing policeman who naturally got the wrong end of the story even though Toby was dressed
in an expensive silk dressing gown. Fortunately he was not arrested and the next day found the keys. At first he was taken
up by the Princess Margaret set, who loved the squalid little street, but fortunately they did not stay long. The name Rockingham
came from a porcelain
catalogue and seemed suitable for a club, so he bought a Rockingham vase and called the club after it. After the vase got
smashed, Toby discovered that a horse called Rockingham had won the St Leger in 1833 and managed to find a painting of the
horse by Herring. Most members thought this was inspiration for the name.
¹⁰
The club had flock-striped wallpaper and chandeliers. Quentin Crisp described it as the ‘closet of closets… [ where ] top
drawer queers’ danced together discreetly. Bacon found it dull and one day when he, Dan Farson and Deakin were drinking there,
Deakin passed out and had to be carried drunk up the stairs while the regulars clucked in disapproval. Bacon turned and shouted
back down the stairs: ‘Even unconscious, he’s more fun than you lot!’
¹¹
It was used in the sixties by art dealers like Robert Fraser as a discreet but slightly louche place to meet clients.

In December 1948 a group of musician friends got together to start a venue where they could play their own new brand of jazz.
There were ten musicians: Johnny Rogers, Tony Crombie, Leon Calvert, Lennie Bush, Hank Shaw, Joe Muddell, Bernie Fenton, Laurie
Morgan, Tommy Pollard, Ronnie Scott and the manager, Harry Morris; so they called it Club Eleven. It was the first club in
Britain to feature modern jazz entirely. It was housed behind Mac’s theatrical rehearsal rooms in Mac’s Club, in Ham Yard.
You entered through 41 Great Windmill Street, next door to Phil Rabin’s Salt Beef Bar, halfway between Archer Street and Shaftesbury
Avenue and came out of the back door into Ham Yard, where the actual entrance to the huge basement club was located. Membership
was five shillings and it cost 3s 6d to get in. The doorman was a huge black boxer called Charlie Brown but anyone with a
genuine interest could usually talk their way in. Later, in 1950, it became Cy Laurie’s Jazz Club.

There is an evocative account of how news of the club spread around Soho in the autobiography of Raymond Thorp –
Viper, the Confessions of a Drug Addict
– published in 1956. He remembered the excitement in 1948 when it opened and attracted the coolest customers away from Feldman’s
Swing Club at 100 Oxford Street:

‘Say man,’ he said excitedly. ‘You heard about the Club Eleven? Was there last week. Man, but man it makes this ’ole town
look like a Model T Ford.’ His eyes sparkled and soon he was telling us about a new jazz club that had opened in Great Windmill
Street – a few yards from Piccadilly Circus. About the cool cats who were going there and the hot music that ‘really gets
the joint a jumping.’ Within weeks everyone was discussing the new club.
¹²

Thorp described the clientele as ‘crazy, really gone’. He distinguished between the Club Eleven customers and the people who
went to Feldman’s: ‘These were
professional
layabouts as distinct from the kids from the suburbs.’
¹³
Many of them were musicians, many were pot smokers, or junkies or cocaine users; there were American servicemen on leave,
petty crooks, teenage girls who liked the music and the atmosphere, and likely lads such as Thorp. The new club was instantly
popular and soon began to open every night of the week. It was at Club Eleven that Raymond Thorp first used pot, and not long
afterwards he was dealing it. He finished up in Pentonville for larceny. Another major dealer there was Big Dave, who lived
in one of the bombed houses in Phoenix Street, off Charing Cross Road.
¹⁴
The compere was Cecil ‘Flash’ Winston, whose jokes prefigured Ronnie Scott’s own terrible puns. There was something totally
Soho about Club Eleven, – it could not have existed anywhere else. There was a nice story of the club manager, Harry Morris,
who was once taken as far as Marble Arch. He looked at the expanse of grass in Hyde Park and said: ‘I’ve had enough of this,
let’s get back to town.’

Within a few months the club had become so successful that it moved to new, larger premises at 50 Carnaby Street, where they
decided to feature acts other than themselves and began booking American acts. Things were going all right when, on 15 April
1950, Ronnie Scott was just blowing his way through the final choruses of Charlie Parker’s ‘Now’s the Time’; when he opened
his eyes he found the place full of cops. As he wrote: ‘We were being raided by the drug squad – and the joints were jumping’,
in this case being thrown on the floor, along with small packets of powder. A dozen musicians and customers spent a night
in the cells at Savile Row police station – where a decade later Robert Fraser used to buy his hash – and Ronnie Scott was
charged with possession of cocaine as well as the marijuana. The chief inspector explained to the magistrate that bebop was
‘a queer form of modern dancing – a Negro jive’. They were all fined between £5 and £15 and the club closed shortly afterwards.
Ronnie Scott explained that it ‘eventually got out of hand, none of us being businessmen. It developed into a sort of organized
chaos.’
¹⁵
It was not until 30 October 1959 that Ronnie Scott and Pete King opened Ronnie Scott’s at 39 Gerrard Street. They moved to
their bigger, now legendary premises on Frith Street on 17 December 1965.