[The Cunning Tower by Kim Davis: December 4, 2018]
Christopher Howse was there. Not just in the 1980s, but through much of the 1990s too. If I didn’t recall, as in fact I do, his tweedily bearded appearance, the granularity of detail in his memoir, Soho in the Eighties, would be immediately convincing. As soon as page 5, he is busy reconstructing the interior of the Coach & Horses pub, from the mysterious stone trough running along the punter’s side of the bar, to the dumb waiter hatch, and the “wobbly end” of the wooden rail to which drinkers often clung for support.
When he mentions the “niche behind the bar flap” providing “shelter for a book to be stowed out of harm from spillage,” I immediately see Stephen Pickles, publisher and one-off novelist (Queens, 1984), pushing a valuable old volume from the London Library into the narrow space.
Where Howse was an active participant in the incidents and badinage of the so-called “deep end” of the bar, I was a mere observer. My own preferred position was on a stool, with my back to the wooden partition which half-heartedly divided the “deep end” from the central part of the bar; there was another partition dividing the center from the “Italian end,” where local Italian workers and waiters would drink convivially until someone’s mother was referenced (“My mother?” “Your mother!” “Look out,” Michael O’Donnell, the bar’s manager, would observe in his laconic Irish lilt, shuffling slowly away).
I watched and overheard Jeffrey and Bruce Bernard, trench-coated foreign correspondent Richard West, cartoonist Michael Heath, Howse himself, and the range of usual suspects; above all Pickles, who – with his cut-glass accent and occasionally stentorian tone – was a more dominating figure than Howse perhaps portrays. That charming lady, Diana Lambert, tried to engage me in conversation; I was too shy. In the French House, a block away, I did chat with Sandy Fawkes. I also experienced the two poles of Dan Farson’s personality; one evening he complimented me politely on my jacket; the next evening he grasped me by the lapels, and bellowed unintelligibly into my face.
Howse’s splendid book is an avowed successor to Farson’s own Soho in the Fifties, which had captivated me when it was published in 1987 (and is now fetching high prices online). Its appearance was perfectly timed. In 1987, I completed my graduate studies at Bristol University, and moved back to London, where I immediately began frequenting the Coach, as well as other bars, like the exquisitely tiled Dog & Duck. In 1989, I moved to the manor, and lived there until departing for New York in 1997.
But I had older memories of Soho too. My father had passed through the neighborhood in his tours of London nightlife, which took him from the Elysée on Tottenham Court Road, to the Boulogne on Gerrard Street, via a seedy hostess club in the vicinity of Great Chapel Street, which survived at least into the ‘90s. For myself, I’d become a regular contributor to the New Musical Express after leaving school. When its offices moved from south of the river to Carnaby Street, I began meeting musicians and record company publicists in the pubs of Soho, especially the Admiral Duncan. In the evenings, of course, I went to shows at the Marquee Club in Wardour Street, drank in the Duke of Wellington, and had my first experience of the smoky, crowded French, the windows of which seemed never then to be opened.
Real Soho
Like Farson, Howse unapologetically defines Soho as the cluster of thoroughfares and alleys cupped by Greek Street to the east, Dean Street to the west, and Old Compton Street to the south – an area not much larger than the interzone between Rue du Four and Rue de Buci in Paris where, as Guy Debord memorably recalled, “our youth so completely went astray as a few glasses were drunk.” Howse’s story unfolds in two pubs, the Coach & Horses and the French House, and a club, the Colony, with a few additional scenes in friends’ apartments or at out-of-town racetracks.
Although I lived two blocks west of Dean Street, on Rupert Street – inexcusably invisible on the willfully unreliable map which is the book’s frontispiece – I too would have acknowledged Howse’s chosen terrain as the epicenter of the neighborhood. I visited the Coach most evenings; the French House two or three times a week; drank espresso in Bar Italia; bought ham and cheese croissants for breakfast from Patisserie Valerie; ate at Jimmy’s on Frith Street, or occasionally upstairs at Kettner’s, and have my own fund of stories from that narrow acre.
Nobody who drank regularly in the Coach lacks stories about Norman Balon, London’s rudest landlord. Howse has a rare stock; here are some of mine. To a regular who walked in one day wearing sunglasses: “Wosser matter wiv you, you got AIDS or somefink?” To a pretty young woman: “Where d’ya work? The Gaslight? They’re all ‘ookers there, ain’t they?”
One rule of the house was that Norman never served customers. But he also never tired of teasing. On a quiet evening he hovered over me until I cracked: “A large vodka please.” The Cheshire Cat grin: “One of my staff will be with you shortly.”
On Christmas mornings, he would occasionally pull a pint. His family staffed the bar on that one day of the year, as he was too mean to pay his regular bartenders triple time. He would pass out commemorative mugs to the regulars. One Christmas morning, the old Hollywood movie The Wizard of Oz was playing quietly on the television, watched by a few fragile, hungover, customers. Norman seized the remote control: “That’s enough of that fucking crap.” (Balon’s own memoir was called You’re Barred, You Bastards! – an absurd euphemism, as he would never call someone a bastard if he could call them a “cunt”).
Sometimes customers turned the tables, as when he hung a painting of the pub on the wall, and sat down to admire it. Unfortunately, it was better described as a painting from the pub, representing a view across Greek Street from one of the Coach’s windows. This was soon pointed out to him. “You can’t tell it’s a painting of the Coach,” someone remarked. “If anything, it’s a painting of Kettner’s” (the pizza palace opposite). “You lot know nuffink about fucking art,” he screamed, and stormed out.
If Norman was a storm, his manager Michael O’Donnell was a sort of creeping mist – quietly but equally rude. On being asked by a polite American couple one evening whether the bar served food, “No, and we don’t have a bed for the night either. We’re not a hotel.” A fabulously gratuitous response to a reasonable question (and the Coach did serve food at lunchtime).
Michael eventually came to accept me, and admit me to his gossip circle (it required several years of dutiful attendance). So predictable were my Sunday evenings in the Coach, that when I visited after a year living in New York, Michael looked at the clock, raised an eyebrow, and hissed “You’re running a little late.”
I remained anonymous to Balon. Indeed, when I tried to enter the bar in the middle of one busy evening, he pushed me firmly out of the door, yelling “Fuck off, we’re closed.” I never discovered why.
I was ejected more slowly from the Colony Club by the outrageous Ian Board (and Howse has stories to tell about him I hadn’t heard before). Never a member, I climbed the narrow stairs one day determined at least to get a look at the place. While I did so, Board spluttered a series of profanities, climaxing in a grand dismissal: “Try Gerry’s (a rival club), I’m sure they’re looking for new members there.”
Beyond a Boundary
In fact, my own club was the Tatty Bogle, in Kingly Court just off Carnaby Street. It had been founded in 1917 by officers from a Scottish regiment, which explained the name, meaning “scarecrow.” By the 1990s, it served after hours drinks to a rum cast of characters, and to a cross-dressing community which held its own night there once a week. It was a late-night club rather than, like the Colony, an afternoon club, which suited me, as I had a nine-to-five job during most of my Soho residence.
The host was the smart and witty pianist and composer Michael Jackson, who would arrive after playing for guests at the Savoy Hotel’s American Bar. Later the Tatty Bogle sold its soul to rave music.
Living on Rupert Street, above the market, and with a view of the fraudulent sex clubs of St Anne’s Court, I never felt constrained by the Farson-Howse frontiers. A few steps from my bedsit were some of the neighborhood’s best food shops, especially Randall & Aubin, then a first-rate butcher, and vendor of French cheese and charcuterie. It had recently re-opened; when Ian Board arrived to inspect it, he found he was unable to buy eggs and bacon, and had departed crooning “It won’t do, sorry, it won’t do.”
It will be in good company.
Leaning out of my window, I could see Raymond’s Revue Bar, which at least offered real striptease, unlike the near-beer hostess clubs. I never attended a strip show there, but would visit late on Saturday nights to watch the comedian Eddie Izzard host live comedy in an upstairs room. That introduced me to the Revue Club bar, a secluded and very red room, and a perfect setting for a Hank Janson thriller.
Earlier, I might have visited the Blue Posts on Berwick Street, an excellent market pub run by Bill and his wife, a couple from Northern Ireland. Busy during the day-time with shoppers, and on weekday evenings with local theater and film people, it provided a respite on Saturday evenings from Old Compton Street’s hubbub. The relative peace was occasionally broken by the Belfast comic Frank Carson, a friend of the proprietors, who would barrel through the door, already booming his catchphrase, “It’s the way I tell ‘em,” and spin one-liners until he left.
There was the King’s Head in Chinatown, where another manager named Michael, a diminutive, ever-cheerful figure, was perhaps the fastest and best bartender in the vicinity (Michael in the Coach notoriously served in extreme slow motion). The other drinkers were theater people, again, and members of the Chinese community. There was a cavernous basement for the overspill. In poorer days, I ate at Man Lee Hong, a step away along Lisle Street, where the curtains were chewed by mice, and a big plate of mystery meats and rice cost two quid. That was even cheaper than Jimmy’s, where I remember sitting next to Derek Jarman as I ploughed my way through the braised meat, big chips (fries) and salad, washed down with a bottle of Othello red wine.
When money came in, there was L’Epicure on Romilly Street, where a regular from the Italian end of the Coach, a waiter with a disarming squint, would spray vegetables across the table in a version of service à la russe. There was terrific modern British cooking at The Lexington, just opposite Andrew Edmund’s wine bar; curries at the Raj Mahal on Berwick Street; old-fashioned Swiss food (filet mignon in brandy and cream) at St Moritz; trout with almonds at the kitsch Spanish Marbella on (I think) Wardour Street. Au Jardin des Gourmets remained expense account-only, although I could sometimes afford Transylvanian stew at the Gay Hussar.
And then there was Fitzrovia, of course, known in its day as just another part of Soho. In the 1940s, according to the writer and bar-propper Julian MacClaren-Ross, Bohemians would think nothing of beginning the evening north of Oxford Street, crossing to The Highlander on Dean Street, as the Nelly Dean was then known, to take advantage of its later closing hours. (I drank in the Nelly Dean only on Sunday lunchtime, when the landlord, Gwynn, would lay out a free feast of sausages and roast potatoes; easier on the alcohol-stressed stomach than the Coach’s spiced olives.) I followed the ghost of MacClaren-Ross to The Wheatsheaf, largely taken over by postal workers from across the street. But to the denizens of the true Soho, it might as well have been on the other side of the Channel.
Faces through the Fog
It’s true, nevertheless, that the Coach and the French are the settings which haunt me. And not just the characters Howse resurrects: although I’m glad he mentioned Danny Kirwan. Kirwan, who died recently, was widely obituarized as a gifted rock musician. In his Soho days, nobody seemed to want to know him. Courteous and quietly spoken when he needed to reach past you to lift his pint from the bar, he’d then sit over the beer for hours, mostly silently, occasionally letting out a loud bark.
I also remember the drink bandit, a tall and imposing figure who would walk into a bar, pick up someone’s drink, drain it without a word, and walk out before they could react (I saw him do it to the television comedian Rory McGrath in the French one evening). I remember the chancer who garnered free drinks by telling people it was his birthday (“It was your birthday yesterday too,” I was sometimes forced to tell him).
There was the ex-boxer (I hope that’s what he was, with that nose, those ears) who would inventively touch me for a tenner in the French, asking me if I had any poetry to publish: “We’re always looking for poets.” Once he was accompanied by a burly West Indian woman, who unexpectedly punched me in the stomach. “No,” he said, “He’s not the one I told you about. We like him.”
And, of course, the Irish charmer who would shame tourists out of their money. “Do you trust an Irish man?” he would plaintively ask. When they insisted they did, he’d affect disbelief. “If you trust me, hand me a tenner now. I’ll walk out the door, and be back with it in five minutes.” It’s amazing how many people did as he asked; but then, it’s amazing how many lonely men wandered into the rip-off “sex” club opposite my apartment.
Gone with the Wind
What of Howse himself? There the narrative treads lightly. What did he do in the Spectator office he shared with Heath? (We do learn that Heath was busy drawing cartoons for other periodicals.) He tells us that he stopped drinking, but not why. And I do wonder what people will make of Howse’s book who were never there; who never knew these faces; never flung roses, roses, riotously with the throng?
But the thing is – so many were there.
These bars and clubs were packed with customers, and in subsequent years I’ve met many people who recall the Coach and the French, Norman Balon, and Noel and Lesley (who took over the French from Gaston Berlemont, flung open the windows, and installed a young Fergus Henderson as chef in the small restaurant they re-opened upstairs).
I’ve scarcely mentioned Jeffrey Bernard. I never spoke to him. One piece of repartee I recall was a response to someone at the bar who read aloud a paragraph from the newspaper, concluding “You learn something new every day.” “You fucking do,” said our latter-day Byron.
But the truth is that it was Bernard who drew me back to Soho, after years away from London, through his “Low Life” column in The Spectator. I discovered it when I worked for a few months at the Royal Institute of British Architects on Portland Place. Staff were paid partly in proprietary lunch vouchers, which could be used to purchase alcohol in the subsidized bar on the award-winning building’s top floor.
I would lunch liquidly, most days, thumbing through the complimentary magazines in the employees’ lounge. I soon discovered Taki and Bernard in The Spectator. Skiing in Gstaad didn’t resonate, but I shared Bernard’s curiosity about what was happening on licensed premises all over London once the bolts slid back.
My journey as a journalist and drinker was already underway, but it was Bernard who channeled it specifically through Soho, and made me want to live there rather than just visit. Thanks to him for the blurred memories, to be treasured forever; and thank you, Christopher Howse, for rekindling them.
Soho in the Eighties is published by Bloomsbury Continuum, and Jeff Bezos will deliver it even in the United States.
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