London Calling (4 page)

There she would sit, perched on her stool, in her twenties coat with a furcollar,
her beret cocked on the side of her head, often looking the worse for wear. In her autobiography Janey Ironside, professor
of fashion at the Royal College of Art, described her as wearing ‘a very shabby navy suit with a rusty black shirt and grubby
wrinkled cotton stockings. She was dirty, smelt of stale bar-rooms, and very pathetic.’
⁷
Her conversation became increasingly abrupt and bizarre, her opening gambit inevitably: ‘Got any mun, deah?’ delivered in
her cut-glass public school accent while rattling the tobacco tin in which her friends, and anyone else she could beg from,
were expected to contribute to the price of the next double gin. When she did try and clean herself up the results were disastrous.
‘I took my grey dress to the dry cleaner’s and my dear, it just shrivelled up because of the gin soaked into it over the years.
All they gave me back was a spoonful of dust.’
⁸
She was only sixty-six when she died in 1956, falling on to the iron railings outside her flat in Paddington; almost certainly
a suicide.

After six o’clock the northern reaches of Fitzrovia became depopulated as the nomadic tribes moved south in a tidal drift
towards Soho and the pubs of Rathbone Place: the Wheatsheaf, the Marquis of Granby and the Bricklayer’s Arms. London boroughs
had different opening times for their pubs. Through a quirk of the asinine licensing laws, the Fitzroy Tavern, the Wheatsheaf
and the Bricklayer’s Arms all closed at 10.30 p.m. because they were in Holborn so that as closing time drew closer there
was an exodus to the nearby Marquis of Granby which, being on the other side of Rathbone Place, was in Marylebone and stayed
open until 11 p.m.. The more energetic hotfooted down Rathbone Place and across Oxford Street to Soho, where all the pubs
stayed open until eleven. The nearest acceptable one was the Highlander (now inexplicably called the Nellie Dean), on Dean
Street.

The Wheatsheaf on Rathbone Place is famous as the home from home of another fixture of that period, the writer Julian Maclaren-Ross
as well as being one of the many watering holes frequented by Dylan Thomas. They were on friendly nodding acquaintance, having
worked together writing film-scripts during the war, but both demanded their own courtiers and the loyalties and allegiances
of the Wheatsheaf ’s patrons were much fought over so they never stood at the bar together. Maclaren-Ross had a fixed routine:
from midday until closing time at 3 p.m. he drank at the Wheatsheaf, standing in his habitual place, propped against the far
end of the bar near the fireplace. If he thought he would be late he tried to send someone to take up the position for him;
it would have been intolerable to him to have to join the jostling crowd in the middle of the bar, where the service was not
so good.

He stood beneath one of the tartans – not his own, as he often pointed out, (unnecessarily, as most people knew this was not
his real name; he was born James Ross in South Norwood in 1912 – the Julian was an affectation, and was the name of a neighbour
who assisted with his birth).
⁹
Dressed in his usual moth-eaten teddy-bear coat, dark sunglasses despite the pub gloom, a fresh pink carnation in his lapel,
his black wavy hair swept back, waving a long cigarette holder housing a Royalty extra-large gold-tipped cigarette and sometimes
gesticulating with his gold-topped malacca cane, Maclaren-Ross had successfully reinvented himself as a member of London high
bohemia. Before the war, he had been a lowly door-to-door vacuum-cleaner salesman in Worthing, a tragedy retold in
Of Love and Hunger
(1947), but his stories of war-time conscription had been well received by both the critics and the public. Now he was a
fixture of Fitzrovia, drinking beer with whisky chasers which he ordered using the Americanism ‘Scotch on the rocks’ that
he had picked up from the popular films and thrillers he loved so much. When red wine once more became available after the
war he switched to that.

After a late lunch at the Scala restaurant on Charlotte Street he would stroll around the bookshops on Charing Cross Road,
where the only shop that sold Royalty cigarettes in Soho was located. He was back at the Wheatsheaf for opening time. He drank
until 10.30 closing, then came a quick trot down Rathbone Place to the Highlander on Dean Street for a final half-hour drinking.
He then walked back to Fitzrovia for supper and coffee at the Scala and home to wherever he was staying at the time: hotel,
flat or park bench. Throughout all these hours, Maclaren-Ross would have been talking non-stop; virtually anyone would do
as an audience. ‘At the sound of his booming voice, the habitués of the back tables, accustomed though they were to its nightly
insistence, looked up in a dull horrified wonderment. There was no getting away from that voice,’ wrote Henry Cohen in
Scamp
.

Even at closing time, Maclaren-Ross would avoid going home, and would stop off for a nightcap with any of his long-suffering
friends who would let him in. The writer Dan Davin and his wife were a frequent target and it never occurred to Maclaren-Ross
that they might need to rise at a normal hour. He would settle down, drinking their whisky, an endless flow of anecdotes,
some entertaining, others boring, and descriptions of movies recently and not so recently seen, emitting from his mouth until
the bottle ran dry or his hosts nodded off to sleep in their armchairs. When he finally got home he would write, taking more
amphetamines to keep him alert. In the middle of the night, using his gold Parker fountain pen, which he always referred to
as ‘the
hooded terror’, he would fill endless sheets of paper with his tiny meticulous handwriting, always writing two drafts, and
correcting neither. They were always perfect, ready to be typeset.

Maclaren-Ross was known for his series of witty, cynical, largely autobiographical short stories collected as
The Stuff to Give the Troops
(1944),
Better Than a Kick in the Pants
(1945) and
The Nine Men of Soho
(1946). These days his reputation rests on his evocation of London’s wartime bohemian literary scene in Soho and Fitzrovia,
Memoirs of the Forties
(1965). Sadly he had only completed 60,000 of the projected 120,000 words when he died of a heart attack on 3 November 1965,
but these chapters alone are regarded as masterful. The critic Elizabeth Wilson wrote: ‘For bohemians such as Maclaren-Ross,
life was an absurdist drama, a black joke. This bleak, stiff-upper-lip stoicism was a rather British form of bohemianism,
and Fitzrovia was a very British Bohemia.’ This was a view echoed by the critic V. S. Pritchett: ‘There is nothing else that
more conveys the atmosphere of bohemian and fringe-literary London under the impact of war and its immediate hangover.’

Anthony Cronin worked for the literary magazine
Time and Tide
and employed Maclaren-Ross to write the occasional piece. Sometimes he would appear in the office quite broke, unable to
write because ‘the hooded terror’ and his malacca cane, both heirlooms from his father, or so he claimed, were in pawn. His
friend Anthony Powell, then on the
Times Literary Supplement
, gave him a regular supply of book reviews and ‘middles’ to write, which kept him going, and later, when Powell moved to
Punch
, he employed Maclaren-Ross to write literary parodies. Powell used Maclaren-Ross as X. Trapnell in
A Dance to the Music of Time
, now probably the main reason why people remember his name. Anthony Carson called him Winshaw in
Carson Was Here
and he appears in many memoirs of the period. Dan Davin wrote: ‘To be a friend of his meant not being a friend of a good
many other people. He was arrogant and exacting in company. He did not like to take his turn in conversation; or rather, when
he took his turn he did not let it go.’
¹⁰

Maclaren-Ross’s snobbery and pretensions meant that the moment he had any money he would move into a suite at the Imperial
or some other luxury hotel with no thought that in a week the money would run out and he would find himself on a park bench,
a friend’s couch, or railway station concourse – he regarded Marylebone station waiting room as the most comfortable. He felt
the same way about the newly established National Health System, preferring to owe money to a private doctor, and to have
applied for unemployment money was not even considered. He was constantly on the move, pursued by irate landladies, hoteliers,
bailiffs and tax collectors, rarely staying more
than a week in a rented room before declaring that he had no money. It then took two weeks to legally evict him, during which
time he sought his next accommodation. Some landladies fell for his hard-luck stories and extended him credit; one, who had
finally to set the law on him, allowed him to run up an enormous rent arrears, £100 of it being paid off by the Royal Literary
Fund, which paid the landlady directly knowing that she stood little chance of seeing it if they made the cheque out to Maclaren-Ross.

Despite his boorish and imperious manner, Maclaren-Ross could also be very funny. Wrey Gardiner, publisher of the Grey Walls
Press, recalled:

Maclaren-Ross is tall, handsome and amusing. He came into the back of Subra’s bookshop the other day showing me round an imaginary
exhibition of new painting. ‘Board with Nails,’ ‘Apotheosis’, ‘Coming of Spring’ – a bucket and brush, pointing all the time
to real articles in the room. The painter, he said, was one Chrim. He will be immortal.
¹¹

Though he regarded the fifties as ‘a decade which I could well have done without’, it did produce one of Maclaren-Ross’s more
highly regarded books,
The Weeping and the Laughter
. But mostly it was a period spent in decline; he never stayed anywhere more than a few weeks before running out on the rent,
dodging the bailiffs, living off a constant stream of advances for BBC radio scripts, talks, and parodies or articles and
commissions that he rarely completed, all the while berating his long-suffering publishers and the producers at the BBC who
had bent the rules for him.

The BBC Third Programme was the great unsung saviour of British bohemia. It came into existence in September 1946, directly
after the war. Designed to propagate culture in its highest forms, it immediately became a major, and sometimes the only,
source of funds for poets, playwrights, essayists, composers, short-story writers and public speakers. In his book
In Anger
the historian Robert Hewison identified a ‘BBC Bohemia’ but the majority of its inhabitants did not live in London; like
an American ‘commuter campus’, it was a commuter bohemia. This was truly ‘London calling’. They included Hugh MacDiarmid,
who lived in Scotland; Dylan Thomas, who spent most of his time in Wales when not touring America; W. H. Auden, who visited
from New York; Laurie Lee, who lived in the Cotswolds; Robert Graves visiting from Majorca and Lawrence Durrell from Corfu;
the travel writer Rose Macaulay; and a few London residents such as Muriel Spark, C. P. Snow and George Orwell. Hewison concluded:
‘The features department spent most of its time out of the department and in the pubs where virtually all BBC business
was conducted in a miniature BBC bohemia.’
¹²
For many of the Fitzrovia and Soho regulars this necessitated a change in drinking habits, though they only had to walk a
few blocks to the pubs surrounding the BBC, where the commissioning took place.

Though the BBC Music Department was in Marylebone High Street, the new BBC Third Programme staff quickly adopted the George
on the corner of Great Portland Street and Mortimer Street, which had long been the traditional watering hole of the classical
music fraternity. BBC producers, writers and actors joined motor-car salesmen from their showrooms on Great Portland Street,
and orchestral players from the nearby Queen’s Hall. Sir Henry Wood, musical director of the Queen’s Hall (and director of
the Promenade concerts), is said to have named the George ‘The Gluepot’ because he could never get his players out of it.
BBC classical music producer Humphrey Searle remembered it in his memoirs: ‘It was then a real
rendezvous des artistes
not usually overcrowded; many BBC programmes were discussed and settled within its walls.’
¹³

This area was the centre for London’s classical music: visiting conductors traditionally stayed at the Langham Hotel – now
the Langham Hilton, across from Broadcasting House – and before the war they walked across Portland Place to the Queen’s Hall
to rehearse and perform. The Queen’s Hall had the finest acoustics in London. When it was bombed, the government promised
it would be rebuilt but inevitably an ugly sixties hotel, the Saint George’s Hotel, went up in its place (though the view
from its top-floor bar, ‘The Heights’, is superb). The much smaller Wigmore Hall, a few blocks away, was spared and is still
in use. The George continued for many years as the meeting place for musicians and BBC producers but was taken over eventually
by Regent Street Polytechnic students and by the sixties it had lost its charm.

For the written words the principal BBC Radio commissioning editors were the poet Louis MacNeice, John Arlott, later better
known for his cricket commentaries, and the right-wing demagogue Roy Campbell. Writers and essayists began frequenting the
pubs surrounding the BBC while waiting to rehearse or to broadcast, to meet producers and editors or simply to waylay producers
in the hope of persuading them to give them work. As a consequence the Wheatsheaf, the Bricklayer’s Arms, the Highlander and
the Marquis of Granby gradually fell from favour. The new pubs of choice became the Horse and Groom on Great Portland Street,
nicknamed ‘The Whore’s Lament’, after the despair of the whores when the American servicemen left London at the end of the
war (you have to drunkenly slur the pub’s name to reach this particular derivation), the George or Gluepot, the Dover Castle
on
Weymouth Mews on the way to Marylebone High Street, and the Stag’s Head on New Cavendish Street. In her memoirs, the BBC television
presenter Joan Bakewell called the BBC commitment to the pub as a cultural institution ‘Dublinesque’: ‘the background to good,
even inspirational talk, the setting in which to exchange and develop ideas, commission programmes, cast plays, transact business,
pursue love affairs, avoid involvement in the bureaucracies that were even then shaping up inside the BBC.’
¹⁴