London Calling (3 page)

There were some artists and writers who were locals but mostly they arrived by taxi, tube or bus to eat and, most importantly,
to take up their favourite positions at the bars. The bohemian community of London conducted its business in the pubs and
cafés of the streets between Charlotte Street in Fitzrovia and Dean Street in Soho; a few minutes walk. It never took long
to find someone you knew because no matter where people actually lived, they always travelled to Soho to meet their friends.
The pubs were dingy and uncomfortable and everybody stood. They did not go there for comfort; they were there for the conversation,
the ideas, the alcohol and the atmosphere of male bonhomie which few women were permitted to enjoy. Beer was from the barrel,
people drank whisky and Guinness and the air was a thick fog of Craven ‘A’ and Senior Service. Soho and its environs were
the stage, the various cafés, pubs and clubs were the stage sets, and in them, propping up the bar, were the characters, talking
and talking. George Melly: ‘Soho was perhaps the only area in London where the rules didn’t apply. It was a Bohemian no-go
area, tolerance its password, where bad behaviour was cherished.’
⁴

It was from the nests in Whitfield Street, Howland Street and Fitzroy Street, with the Fitzroy Tavern for home run, that the
idea of Fitzrovianism in the verbal sense was first born… the idea of our group as vagabonds and sadhakas or seekers, as the
Buddha was at the start… The fact that the name I gave, Fitzrovia, persists, does not surprise me, because of the unity of
spirit and atmosphere which made it unique in London in those days.

TAMBIMUTTU
, ‘Fitzrovia’
¹

The underground scene in London didn’t spring into being, ready-formed, at the end of the war. It grew slowly, the product
of many factors, and in the early days there were precious few individuals who could really be considered particularly unconventional.
The colourful characters of the time like Tambimuttu and Julian Maclaren-Ross would not perhaps have merited so much attention
had they lived a few decades later but in the mid-forties they constituted bohemian London.

‘Fitzrovia’ as a name for the neighbourhood was coined just before the war by Tambimuttu, one of the central characters of
wartime literary London, a unique publisher and editor, whose magazine
Poetry London
was a magnet to the most talented of writers in Britain at the time. Meary J. Tambimuttu, known universally as Tambi, was
a Jaffna Tamil, born in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1915.
²
He was an attractive, romantic figure, with long silky black hair that required constant jerks of his head to keep it from
his eyes. The art dealer Victor Musgrove said that he and Tambi were the only two men in the second half of the forties in
London to wear shoulder-length hair. Tambimuttu had tremendous charm, and a naive belief that everything would always work
out: printers would be paid, drinks would be forthcoming, he would not starve to death. He was a literary hustler of exceptional
ability. He loved literature, particularly poetry, though he encouraged a rumour to develop that he never actually read the
manuscripts he was sent, relying instead on instinct and the feel and quality of the paper. Certainly he was known to inform
complete strangers that he would publish their poetry, despite never having read it.

I first met him in the sixties when he came into my bookshop. We had numerous friends in common, including Timothy Leary,
and he had gossip about them all. Then he quite casually suggested that he wanted to publish my poetry, a suggestion which
I found quite extraordinary as I didn’t even write poetry. Despite this he was a superb editor. Unfortunately he was also
untrustworthy and dishonest, he borrowed money constantly and did not repay it, he was sloppy and disorganized and lost manuscripts
entrusted to his care. On one occasion the only copy of one of Dylan Thomas’s new poems was found in the chamber pot beneath
his bed. This is not as surprising as it might seem as, when he finished reading a manuscript, he would reach down the side
of his bed and stuff it into the chamber pot, which was used as a rudimentary filing cabinet. He later invested in a cardboard
box. He lived mostly in Fitzrovia: 45 Howland Street, 2 Fitzroy Street, and 114 Whitfield Street in a house filled with poets
next door to Pop’s café; all now gone, bombed or levelled for office blocks.

His magazine,
Poetry London
, began publication in 1939. At the end of the war he had offices at 26 Manchester Square (now number 4). The publishers Nicholson
and Watson had the first floor and they paid the running costs of
PL
. Editions Poetry London occupied the front room on the third floor, with Nicholson and Watson in a smaller room at the back.
PL
’s long windows looked out over the square through the trees to the Wallace Collection opposite. Their room led off a large
carpeted landing at the top of a gracious curving staircase. There was an elaborate marble mantelpiece cluttered with invitation
cards and memorabilia. Tambimuttu’s desk was between the windows, facing the door.
³

Tambimuttu wore the same clothes until his staff could no longer stand the smell and would insist on him talking a bath. His
secretary Helen Irwin remembered the occasions:

In the middle of the morning I would scrub his back. Such was the din – the shouts, the howls, the splashings of water – that
you would have expected help to rush up from below. Like a schoolboy Tambi made the most of it, calling through the open door:
‘Nick, Gavin! She’s raping me!’ To which, after a bit of banter, they replied they rather doubted it.
⁴

Whenever he spent a weekend in the county with friends he liked to run naked through their houses.

Lucian Freud was a frequent visitor to the offices. One of his projects there was to illustrate Nicholas Moore’s
The Glass Tower
. Freud used to disappear into the green bathroom for up to an hour at a time. When asked what he did
in there he replied that he lay in the empty bath and thought. Other visitors included Henry Moore, who did numerous illustrations
for the magazine, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Smart and Roy Campbell, who was shunned by many on the Fitzrovia–Soho scene because,
as a Catholic, he supported Franco’s side in the Spanish Civil War.

The Hog in the Pound, on the corner of South Molton Street and Davies Street, off Oxford Street, was their local. The landlord,
George Watling, was sympathetic and never fazed by their outrageous behaviour. When the pub closed at 2.30 in the afternoon
they would make their way to the Victory Café, on the left-hand side of Marylebone Lane for a late lunch of sausage and mash
or spaghetti bolognese. Before six o’clock, however, Tambi and some of the office staff would set out on what was known as
the ‘Fitzrovia’ pub crawl. Tambi originally invented this word to define the action: the Fitz-roving, but it quickly became
used by his circle of friends to define the area stretching roughly from Fitzroy Square to Soho Square which had no precise
name: it was North Soho, East Marylebone or West Bloomsbury, none of which were satisfactory. Thus Fitzrovia.

The first stop on the pub crawl was, of course, the Hog in the Pound, an hors d’oeuvre before they headed east down Oxford
Street first to the Fitzroy, then the Wheatsheaf and on down into Soho, usually finishing at the Swiss Tavern. Tambi ate little
and drank a lot, but his contribution to English literature was enormous: he edited fourteen issues of
Poetry London
, and more than sixty books of poetry and prose, often beautifully illustrated, always well designed, produced from 1938 to
1949, featuring everyone from Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender to Lawrence Durrell, W. S. Graham and Katherine
Raine, He published the first books of Herbert Read and David Gascoyne as well as Henry Moore’s
Shelter Sketchbook
. He recognized the genius of Elizabeth Smart and published her
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
, the brilliant autobiographical account of her disastrous marriage to Soho poet George Barker that enraged Barker because
it was so much better than anything he could ever have written. Tambi introduced British audiences to Nabokov, Henry Miller,
Anaïs Nin and scores of other little-known foreign writers.

Tambi died in 1983, when he was living at the October Gallery on Old Gloucester Street, but his spirit lives. Tambimuttu:
‘It was only an attitude of mind that comes to each generation in every country, and in different ways, but for me it happened
in lovely Fitzrovia.’
⁵

*

The morning after V E Day, in May 1945, the Scala Café on Charlotte Street was filled with artists nursing their hangovers
from the celebrations of the night before. The artist Nina Hamnett found the Fitzroy Tavern open but the Wheatsheaf and other
local pubs were closed, probably having run out of drink. She lived just two blocks away in two rooms on the top floor of
31 Howland Street, and had to pass the Fitzroy on her way to Soho. She always looked in, but even if that did not detain her
for very long, she sometimes got no further than the panelled rooms of the Wheatsheaf. Nina Hamnett more than anyone represented
the pre-war spirit of Fitzrovia.
⁶
Born in Tenby, Wales, in 1890, she had studied at a number of art colleges in both London and Paris, where she famously danced
naked as a model for her fellow students, and also became a respected artist in her own right. She experimented with various
styles but the majority of her paintings and drawings were portraits: solid, almost sculptural affairs of friends, lovers
and often just of people she liked the look of. She exaggerated and simplified her compositions to create what she called
‘psychological portraiture’. She had numerous West End gallery shows and sold quite a bit of her work in the twenties and
thirties, but by the forties her work began to suffer badly from her fondness for drink and her busy social life.

Often described as the ‘queen of bohemia’, she had posed in the nude for Sickert, became a close friend of Augustus John and
was Roger Fry’s mistress. She had an affair with Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who made several marble torsos of her and a sculpture
of her dancing naked – she was proud of her body and liked to strip off at parties. Artists liked her long slender figure
and she was a much sought-after model. She introduced herself to the poet Ruthven Todd by saying: ‘You know me, m’dear. I’m
in the V&A with me left tit knocked off ’, a reference to a Gaudier-Brzeska bronze torso of her which had been damaged when
the original plaster cast was made. In Paris before the Great War and in the twenties, she knew all the most important artists
from Modigliani and Picasso to Diaghilev and Stravinsky. She had countless affairs, and had sex with anyone she fancied. Aside
from artists and writers – she took the virginity of 21-year-old Anthony Powell – she had a particular fondness for boxers
and sailors. When asked what she liked about sailors she exclaimed: ‘They go back to their ship in the morning!’ By the late
thirties she was spending virtually all of her time in the pubs of Fitzrovia and Soho, and hardly any at her easel. She was
a great raconteuse, and anyone prepared to buy her a drink was treated to endless – often salacious – anecdotes about her
life in the studios of Montparnasse.

By 1945, the tensions of the war years and the effects of alcohol had
made a pathetic creature of her. She lived in squalor in Howland Street, with cockroaches and bedbugs, and visitors even reported
seeing rat shit on her bedcovers. There was no bathroom – only a communal one on the ground floor – but there was a small
washbasin in the corner of the staircase. In February 1947, when her landlady, Mrs Macpherson, took her to court in an effort
to empty her house on Howland Street and sell it with vacant possession, she claimed that Nina had ‘misused the sink’. But
the magistrate would hear none of it; he interrupted her testimony, saying: ‘What do you mean, a woman urinating in the sink?
It is not possible’, and refused to accept her evidence. This caused great hilarity among Nina’s friends in Fitzrovia, who
knew that her landlady was perfectly right in her accusation.

A convenient fire in the building shortly afterwards caused her to move out. She took two rooms on the second floor of 164
Westbourne Terrace, near the railway lines leading to nearby Paddington Station. The Westway had not yet been built and there
were pleasant walks to the nearby canal basin, where she painted some views of the canal bridges. The area was popular with
younger artists and writers but she remained loyal to Fitzrovia and Soho. She never really adjusted to the move from Howland
Street and did little to make her new apartment habitable. Her wire-link bedstead was covered with old newspapers to keep
in the heat and make it less uncomfortable and she hung her clothes on a piece of rope strung across the room. She had a rolltop
desk but no comfortable chair or sofa. Her books were kept in a row on the mantelpiece and on a shelf above, which was propped
up with a pile of Penguins. The threadbare carpet was badly stained with spilled drinks and was scattered with empty bottles,
cigarette ash and opened books.

In the mid-twenties, she, Augustus John and Tommy Earp had been responsible for consciously making the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte
Street a meeting place for artists in the spirit of a Paris café, and establishing a rival claim to that of Tambimuttu in
having given the neighbourhood a name. With the war over, Nina still remained loyal to the Fitzroy, even though it was now
better known as a pick up place for gay servicemen than for artists; an element of protection was afforded by its more celebrated
regulars: the gay MP Tom Driberg, Hugh Gaitskell, Scotland Yard detectives Jack Capstick and Robert Fabian (‘Fabian of the
Yard’), as well as the official hangman, Albert Pierrepoint. Most days Nina could be found at the bar and, if drinks were
forthcoming, she would sometimes stay there all evening. If not, it was on to the Wheatsheaf, the French or the Swiss House
on Old Compton Street.