Up West (41 page)

Another important part of the sleaze industry were the strip clubs, which thrived in Soho long before they were made legal. The law dictated that if women and men were going to divest themselves of their clothing, they had best do it in the privacy of their own bedrooms, bathrooms or – in the case of men – the locker rooms of their sports clubs, but most definitely not in a theatre or a club in front of an audience.

The famous Windmill Theatre, the one that kept open during the whole of the Second World War and boasted ‘We never closed,' was allowed to display scantily clad and nude women, but only if they formed static ‘tableaux vivants'. No exposed jiggling, wriggling or writhing flesh was allowed, lest it inflame the lewd passions of the eager onlookers. If the tableau depicted some kind of mythological or historical scene, so much the better. Then, it could even be considered educational. This harks back to the Victorians again and the hypocritical attitudes enshrined in their laws. When it came to paintings, suitably draped nudes were allowed, providing the picture had a classical or biblical subject. A nude figure simply standing, lolling or doing something everyday like sweeping a floor, wafting a feather duster about or knocking up an omelette, was just plain lewd and therefore disgusting and illegal.

Naturally, the West End club owners didn't let a little
thing like the law get in the way of making money. Jack Glicco points out in
Madness after Midnight
that strip clubs were alive, well and thriving as far back as the twenties, and probably before that. They were certainly around in the forties and fifties, despite the ever-present threat of prosecution, fines and subsequent closure. There were, of course, ways around the law, and every dubious club owner knew them. The crudest and simplest method was bribery and corruption, but there was also an elegant legal loophole involving private membership.

The notion that private members' clubs were sacrosanct dated back to the inception of the St James's gentlemen's clubs in the eighteenth century. Gambling was allowed in those, even when the law forbade the placing of bets by ordinary people – unless they were actually at a racecourse or dog track. Historically, there had long been one set of rules for the rich or titled and quite another for everyone else. It was good old British snobbery of course. A ‘gentleman' was deemed to have the money and leisure to indulge himself at his club, while the lesser orders should, in theory, be too gainfully employed serving their betters in one capacity or another, to belong to a private members' club. Besides, members had to be voted in: a working man would never have got as far as being nominated. At one time, even millionaires who'd made their piles in trade were snubbed by the ‘best' clubs.

West End club owners changed all that when they took advantage of the system to get strip shows past the censorship
laws. Punters became temporary or life members by paying a small sub at the door. The same wheeze was used by those who wanted to show ‘adult' films, ones that had been rejected or never seen by the censors, to a paying public. The first of these, the Compton Cinema Club, opened opposite the 2I's at 56 Old Compton Street in 1960. The law, trained by previous generations never to bother a gentleman at his club, had no real provision for this new twist, and backhanders ensured that the local police made discretion their byword, unless the bribes were too small or there was trouble at a club that they were unable to ignore.

The owners of strip clubs did their best not to give the police any excuse to declare their houses disorderly. Jack Glicco often earned his money playing at strip clubs as a musician, as did Raye Du-Val, and both agree that messing with the girls was not wise, thanks to the men behind the clubs. As Raye remembers, ‘I did the strip clubs, played all night. The girls in the clubs, you worked behind them, but you weren't allowed to fool around with them, even in the seediest of clubs.'

Things began to change radically when Paul Raymond (real name Geoffrey Anthony Quinn) opened the doors of the Raymond Revuebar on 14 April 1958. Before that, he had run a touring variety show that featured naked girls, who, like those at the Windmill Theatre, were not allowed to move. Rumour has it that Raymond handed out pea-shooters to some members of his audience so that well-aimed, hard little peas would produce some titillating action for the
punters to enjoy, even if the poor bruised girls were less than thrilled. Tired of the law's restriction, he took up the lease on the Doric Theatre in Walker's Court, which joins the southern end of Berwick Street to Brewer Street, and opened his Revuebar using the private members scam operated by many small clubs before him.

The difference was that in those clubs the scam was something that passed on a nod, a wink and lots of pound notes between club owners and the police, while Raymond advertised, and openly charged a guinea on the door for a lifetime membership. Within two years, Raymond's Revuebar boasted amongst its vast membership, ‘Ten MPs, eight millionaires, more than sixty knights, thirty-five peers and enough businessmen and captains of industry to drain dry the Stock Exchange and the Savoy Grill.' This information comes from a 1960 issue of the
Spectator
, appropriately enough.

Like the Windmill, Raymond's Revuebar prided itself on the lavishness of its sets, its costumes and, once the girls were permitted to move, its choreography, which may account for its incredible popularity with wealthy clients and its membership lists. The girls who worked in both places were seen as a cut above the rest, and a few went on to greater things – although most simply slipped down the scale to work in seedier joints as their looks faded.

Perhaps because his was not a private arrangement between him and the police, but a blatant one with his customers, Raymond was prosecuted in 1961. A barrister for the prosecution was heard to wonder how it was possible for
all these people to be members of a private club when not one of them had been proposed and seconded by existing members and voted in by the membership, as was the usual practice at the clubs in St James's, while the judge described Raymond's enterprise as ‘filthy, disgusting and beastly' when he heard how punters rang the three bells that made up the entire costume of Bonnie Bell, the Ding Dong Girl. He was also profoundly shocked by the image presented of Julia Mendez, the Snake Girl, swallowing her snake. He fined Raymond £5,000. This was a vast sum for the times – equivalent to six figures today – but it represented a fraction of the entrepreneur's profits.

Raymond carried on regardless, and where the Revuebar led, lots of other little clubs followed: there was certainly no shortage of punters. Victor Caplin paints a charming picture of the scene in the early sixties: ‘I remember visiting strip clubs like the Carnival on Old Compton Street. There were at least twenty clubs dotted around a very close area, and the girls would run from one to another, click-clacking hurriedly in their high heels, usually wearing toreador pants and perhaps an animal skin print blouse. They all carried one of those boxy little make-up cases. They would be fined if they were late for their spot.

‘It used to be so funny: these places were tiny, perhaps eight or ten rows of seats, maybe only six across and some standing room at the back. They were filled with guys with either a raincoat or a newspaper on their laps. There was always a few minutes to wait between each girl, and as
people left, there would be a mad scramble over the seats to get to the front and a better view. The girls all looked so bored. They would prance across the stage, squinting as they moved in to the spotlights towards some tawdry prop, the odd piece of clothing falling to the floor. They would make a big deal about placing their own towel on the scuzzy chair that would support them as they finally revealed all, for one split second, as the curtains closed . . . and then the mad scramble for a better place and the wait for the next chance to see what all the big fuss was about.'

I also remember those scuttling girls, who wore heavy make-up and yards of false eyelashes, dashing from one venue to another, goose-pimpled and breathless as they hurried. Sometimes they'd have a cigarette on the go, dying for a gasper between shows.

The Revuebar not only opened the way to legal striptease clubs, but it also had the first sign openly offering STRIPTEASE in bright neon lettering. Raymond didn't stop there; he revolutionized the other sector of the ‘glamour' market too. Harrison Marks, a ‘glamour photographer' with studios in Gerrard Street, had begun publishing the ‘nudie mags'
Spic
and
Span
in the late fifties, but in the sixties Raymond upped the ante with the launch of such barely legal ‘girlie' magazine titles as
Men Only
,
Escort
,
Razzle
and
Club International
. He made enough money from his various enterprises to buy up large chunks of Central London real estate, and was able to claim that his was the only private London estate to be formed in the twentieth century.

As in the best morality tales, though, Raymond's great financial success did not bring him ultimate happiness. He died in March 2008, a lonely, unhappy recluse whose beloved only child had predeceased him, thanks to a heroin overdose. Still, perhaps the last word on glamour and sleaze is best left to the self-styled ‘King of Soho' who built an empire on it: ‘There will always be sex – always, always, always.'

*
See Chapter 15 ‘Working Girls', for a fuller explanation of the Act.

*
Despite being essentially innocent, many of McGill's seaside postcard designs were indeed illegal to possess. Winston Churchill's fifties government was so hot on censorship that they introduced local watch committees, and as a result Donald McGill was prosecuted under the 1857 Obscene Publications Act. After this his brand of saucy postcards disappeared from the scene for quite a while.

*
Penguin Books were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act for publishing D.H. Lawrence's
Lady Chatterley's Lover
in 1960. When the Crown lost the case, it opened the doors for the subsequent publication of many other erotic works on the basis that they had ‘artistic merit'.

When people talk about vice and the West End they are usually referring to the sex trade, but in the mid twentieth century, gambling was also considered a serious vice, and the public was protected from it – in theory anyway – by a series of restrictive laws passed in the nineteenth century that reflected Victorian morality and rampant snobbery. You could legally play cards and casino games for money only in private homes and licensed gentlemen's clubs. Bookmakers could legally take bets only at ‘pitches' on the racecourse or dog track. The only form of lottery was the weekly football pools, and even there, maximum prizes were set by law throughout the fifties.

The law's repressive attitude ensured that gambling was equated with crime. Even where it was legal, it had a criminal following. In the twenties and thirties, for example, the typical criminal organization in Britain was the ‘race
gang', which had nothing to do with racism, as the name would suggest today, but everything to do with preying on ‘the racing fraternity'. Members of the gangs subsisted – and often lived very well – on the proceeds of mugging punters, shaking down bookmakers, gaining control of pitches and charging extortionate rents, and influencing the result of the odd race or two. It was activities like this that sustained underworld figures such as Jack Spot and the Sabini gang in much the same way that Prohibition in America had sustained Al Capone and his chums. Although the Sabini brothers were indeed Italians from Clerkenwell, our home-grown mob substituted a good duffing up with coshes, fists, razors and shivs (knives) for the Mafia's more murderous machine-guns.

Knives were much in fashion in the forties and fifties, and according to my father one was used on him during the Soho Fair. I was never able to verify the tale, and Father did have a tendency to elaborate fancifully – or indeed, tell outright porkies – but he swore that Frankie Fraser stabbed him in the back over an altercation about the outcome of a horse race. It was true that he did have a scar, and it was also true that he knew Frankie Fraser, but as my mother was wont to say, ‘If your father tells you it is raining, it's wise to check.'

It might seem odd, even quaint, to the modern eye but betting on a horse race in the forties and fifties was perfectly acceptable if the transaction involved the punter and bookmaker meeting face to face on the racecourse; otherwise it was frowned upon. This meant that the working classes were
effectively largely excluded from legal gambling during the working week and, if the racecourse was hard to get to, at weekends as well. And it created two shady professions that no longer exist, the street bookie and the bookie's runner. Some street bookies actually collected money on the streets, while others maintained fairly swish offices, called themselves ‘turf accountants' and took bets over the phone from posh types who couldn't get away from the office.

There were plenty of well-heeled gamblers. As Owen Gardner remembers, ‘The founder of Page's, Harry Bradbury-Pratt, was a great gambler. He lost three fortunes in his lifetime, but when he died in about 1949, he still left about £75,000, which was a lot of money in those days. He was an owner, too. When his horse was running, and it was running to win, he'd send a memo round the shop, to say there's ten shillings on for everybody in the firm. He'd put a bet on for everybody and pay everybody out, if it won, at the end of the race.'

Janet Vance's father, Charlie Blyghton, was the sort of street bookie who rarely dealt with high rollers. ‘His pitch,' she remembers, ‘was on the street in Bateman Buildings, just opposite where we lived. He had lookouts, one at the Soho Square end and one at the corner of Greek Street. They would blow a whistle or something to let him know if the police were around. He had a phone connected to the racecourse actually in our flat, so he got all the results there and then. He used to pay out in the Carlisle Arms in Bateman Street. All the winners would know to go there. And it was good for the
pub, too, because while they was in there with their winnings, they'd be buying drinks. That was part of the deal. Let me pay out here, and they'll buy drinks with the money.'