Up West (45 page)

The West End had some problems to overcome that weren't shared by the rest of the capital. ‘Other places in London might have had rough people, but they were all local rough people,' Ronnie Mann told me. ‘The problem with the West End was all the people coming in. You had the Nuffield Centre down by St Martin's Lane, which was the forces, Americans, Canadians, New Zealanders, British, and they used to fight like hell. Down in Bedfordbury, you had the Welsh Harp at the corner, the Marquis of Granby, the Black Horse. Now the
Black Horse, there was always fights with the soldiers, right up through the forties to the early fifties, there was still loads of people stationed over here.'

Charles Hasler agrees. ‘The West End was always full of people from all over. In my day, in the early fifties, you couldn't move for American servicemen. In Piccadilly Circus or Leicester Square, you would always find up to three, sometimes four, West End Central police officers, four or five American Snowdrops [military police officers] with their white helmets walking around, and a couple of pairs of our Redcaps. I mean, I was there when the Korean war was going on, and the number of people over the wall [Absent Without Leave or AWOL] from various places was tremendous.'

Another place you could more or less be guaranteed to find a good punch-up was the South Bank. ‘After the Festival of Britain was on in 1951, that area all became derelict,' remembers Ronnie Mann. ‘It was like a huge gladiatorial fighting ground. Gangs used to come from, well, everywhere, it seemed to me, like Roman legions fighting each other. On reflection, it was this macho image from the war. There might have been gang violence, punch-ups, but it was macho, rather than gang. When you had a fight, it was to prove you were tougher. You didn't have to kick the shit out of someone or stick the knife in, that was beneath you.'

Andy Pullinger was a Ted, but one with a restrained, even genteel side to his violence. ‘Compared to today's gangs, we were a calm bunch. There were quite a gang of
us. Coming from all over. Some from the Elephant & Castle area, others from Camden Town and Knightsbridge. There was Sweetpea, Glen Cardno, Tom Mathers, Spider, who was very short, and Willy, who was tall and thin. Willy carried around large quantities of change because, as he said, if he got rolled they would only look for the pound notes. There was an occasional fight at the pub around the corner on Dean Street. No weapons were used apart from putting the boot in.'

Pubs formed the focus for many a fight; the line between a knees-up and a punch-up is an easy one to cross. ‘One New Year's,' Mike O'Rouke remembers, ‘we were down the Mercer's Arms, my old man's playing the piano, and this gang, they're in their late twenties, had come in, and the old girl says, “No, I'm not serving you.” They came up to where I'm standing in the pub, talking, holding a pint of beer, and this guy barges in to me, drink all over me, and I said something, and he said, “Right, outside.” As he went out, Wallop, my dad's chinned him.

‘Within seconds the bloody place was in uproar. My sister's saying “Don't hit him, dad, don't hit him,” and the poor little sod, my old man's chinning him left and right. All the geezers who'd been drinking and were tight as lords had come out, and there was punch-ups galore in the street. Somebody said to call the police. They phoned for help and they said we can't come, there's nobody left in Bow Street. You can never get a policeman on New Year's Eve.'

While most people knew the rules about violence, things
could escalate, if someone was reckless enough to ignore the warning signs, as Ronnie ruefully remembers. ‘When I had my teeth knocked out down the Lyceum, it was my fault. I should have known better. I was a bit cocky. I was working in the market, I was fairly fit, fairly strong, I'd done a bit of boxing when I was a kid. I got knocked out twice in successive fights, so I wasn't very good, but I was still cocky enough to think I could handle myself. It was a lunchtime, and there was this girl I fancied, so I went over and danced, and I should have known then there was a group of guys she'd been dancing with, but I couldn't give a shit. When I come off, they all come around me, and I could still have got away, but I was just “F off” and all that.

‘Thinking back, the guy who done it was two or three years older, a lot tougher and stronger and bigger, and in a one-to-one he'd probably have won in any case, but as soon as he slipped a knuckleduster on, and there was three or four of them, you knew what was going to happen. Most people thought I deserved it, because of what I'd done, and when the bouncers turned up afterwards, they didn't want to get involved with this guy. I didn't know him, but he was obviously a lot tougher, and had a rep. Those bouncers were tough, too: I saw them in a fight and they opened up the exit – you know, “Push Bar to Open” – with this guy's head, banged it on the bar then literally flung him out.'

While Ronnie's childhood gang from the Bedfordbury would take on the other Peabodyites from Wild Street in great mêlées, others found different reasons to take sides.
John Carnera steered clear, but his brother did not. ‘He did get involved in a little bit of gang warfare, because there were rival gangs, you know. For example, in those days, my brother and his mates were all up in arms against Greeks. There were a lot of Greek kids. There were one or two big fights down in Golden Square. Pitched battles. Fists and other things flying about as well. This was the mid fifties. He was involved in that, I was a bit young. Kids at that age wanted to show off who they were, so they formed gangs and then went looking for other gangs. That's the way it happens.'

Sometimes outside events intervened to give street fights a particularly vicious edge, as Chas McDevitt remembers: ‘There was quite a lot of trouble at the Freight Train, because around the corner from us, in one of the mews behind Berwick Street was a Cypriot club, and this was at the time of the Cypriot–Greek troubles in Cyprus, so there were often fights. I saw a bloke stagger up the road and actually die outside the coffee bar. Fell on the pavement and died from stab wounds.'

Another problem at the Freight Train was the occasional run-in with ‘Curly King and his gang, a bunch of East End gangster layabouts who always used to cause trouble in the West End. There was one black member, they called him “Omo”, and he was the only black guy I ever remember coming in the coffee bar. They were quite evil lads, always looking for a fight, getting in to running fights in the West End, throwing bricks through windows. We just got the edge of it all, the fracas: our windows would go in, something like
that. Wally Whyton crossed swords with the gang for some reason, and for protection, he used to carry a crowbar down his trouser leg.

‘The Curly King gang were an unsavoury mob. Their girlfriends – they used to call them the Blackies, all dressed in black, black hair – would go up to a stranger in the street and ask him the time, and he'd get his watch out and they'd grab it, or they'd ask him for change for a note and just grab his wallet and run.'

Yet although there were people like the Curly King mob and the Blackies around, the locals rarely came across them as they went about their daily business. ‘I spent a lot of time in the area, and you could walk through it at night without any worries,' Owen Gardner told me. ‘If you were an innocent person, you stayed an innocent person. If you wanted to find trouble, you could find it.'

Sometimes, however, trouble found you. ‘My brother David was one of the Krays' first victims,' Owen recalls. ‘He would have been eleven or twelve, so this was about 1949, 1950. On the way to Sunday School in Kingsway, my younger brothers walked through Covent Garden, and on the way back they picked up all these orange wrappers. Each individual orange had its own wrapping to keep them fresh, printed with different coloured designs. My little brothers would collect them like stamps.

‘So, this one time these lads came up to David and said, “What have you got there?” and he just said “Orange wrappers.” They started razoring David's school blazer. He
came home looking like a tramp, with it all shredded, and in one place they had cut through, and there was a cut on his back.

‘Anyway, we were one of the few places in those days who had a phone, and my father was friendly with the police in Bow Street, so he rang them. They found this whole mob of boys in Kingsway, I don't know how many, six to eight maybe. The police grabbed two of them, sat them in the back of the car, and told them that they'd severed an artery in my brother's back, and that he was in Charing Cross Hospital, and could die, and that they wanted to know who did it. The lads caved in and gave out the names of the Krays, and they were arrested. My father went to court with my brother. The Krays' father, or someone, came up to my father, who was fuming, and said “I'm sorry that this has happened,” and offered him a lift home. I thought my father was going to hit him, but he resisted the temptation.'
*

Owen Gardner's father had a special relationship with
the police at Bow Street because ‘There was a flat roof on Page's warehouse, where we were living, and we used to let the police go up there at night. From there, with a pair of binoculars, they could see what was going on all the way round. They were always up on the roof if they wanted to watch somebody.'

Ronnie Mann was another to find out that it did no harm having the police owe you a favour. ‘Me and Keithy Clarke were going down to the Mercer's Arms in Mercer Street – we were about seventeen, underage – and saw this copper getting beaten up by some bloke he'd tried to arrest. He was on the deck – only a young copper – and he was getting a right kicking. He was pleading for us to help him, and I was a bit wary, because this other guy was a bit tasty, although there were two of us, so I said, “Do yourself a favour, fuck off, because you're only going to get yourself up shit creek, you'll end up doing bird” – because that was what happened if you got done for assault on the Law. And he run off. The copper blew his whistle, and Bow Street come, and whether they got the bloke or not I dunno, but the reality of it was that we were there, and he said “Thanks for helping.”'

Ronnie realized how grateful the police had been for his help a year or two later. ‘Where I worked at Monroe's, in the market, there was apparently quite a few blokes nicking off lorries and that. They had quite a thing going on one of them. The lorry would turn up and they would tell the driver to bugger off, and take as much stuff off as they could, and he'd come back and say he'd been nicked [robbed].

‘The first I knew about it, this policeman came up and asked if I was involved with this guy, so I said no. “If you are,” he said, “do yourself a favour. Lose yourself for the next couple of hours.” I wondered what he was on about. Well, it turned out they came in and nicked the whole lot, about six of them. They all done about two or three years in prison. I wasn't involved, but if I had've been, I'd have ended up doing two or three years, and my whole life would have changed completely – except I would have got away with it because I stopped someone beating up a copper.'

Generally, even in the thick of the West End, Ronnie's experience was the limit of most people's contact with crime and criminals, as John Carnera explains. ‘They never bothered us, or worried us, because we were like civilians, if you like, and they were soldiers. If you were a civilian, you didn't cross their paths.'

Alberto Camisa agreed with John, and was keen to express the dual nature of life in the West End. ‘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. There was obviously some rough stuff, with the Maltese, the nightclubs and so on, but the residents didn't get involved, and the two kept separate. People ask me about the protection racket, but there were no protection rackets with the ordinary shops. Just among themselves. The strip clubs, gambling clubs, they were all illegal, they paid protection. Normal residents had no problem with it.'

Despite what Alberto says, every now and then the two worlds, of the more or less law-abiding locals and the much less law-abiding incomers, did collide, and then there was trouble. Sometimes the outcome was unexpected. The Mann family's picture-framing shop in Monmouth Street was next door to the Nucleus coffee bar, which Gary Winkler ran in the fifties. By the time Ronnie joined the family business in 1962, Gary was long gone, and the ambience in the Nucleus had taken a dive from the bohemian to the seedy. The Manns saw it as a haunt of druggies and general lowlife: ‘It stunk, and all the dossers used to come out in the morning. They'd stay there all night and when they come out, the smell was awful.'

Then, one day, ‘A mob turned up team-handed to sort out the guys that owned the Nucleus. Someone had let off these shotguns at the club in the morning, and my uncle and my dad were a bit pissed off about that. My uncle's nickname was Tiny, and you can imagine why, and my dad was also a big geezer. They both done physical training, and they had big arms and were very fit.

‘I'd been down to the Seven Dials to get some stuff off the ironmongers, and as I was coming back, these guys have turned up, and they're doing a lot of commotion, and one geezer said something to my old man, and he's gone Bang! hit him right across the beak. Another one's come haring up, and as he's going by, my uncle's gone Wallop, hit him into a parked car. Another one's coming and I've got hold of him by the back, I'm kneeing him in the back, my dad's chinned
him, and there's all these people in the street cheering, because they are all pissed off with the Nucleus, which by this time was a drug dealers' den.

‘We had the police called, there were bodies everywhere. One kid turned round to me and gone “You”, and he's gone like that [gestures] with a razor. As he's done that my dad's turned round and gone Wallop, and he's gone down again, bodies everywhere.'