London Calling (5 page)

For someone like Dylan Thomas, the Third Programme was a lifeline. His first solo broadcast for them was a reading from the
work of Keats and in their first year he did fourteen more broadcasts for them as well as a further thirty-two for other BBC
radio services such as the Eastern, and Light services. Dylan’s carefully enunciated rather upper-class tones quickly became
well known to the educated British public. He was often employed to recite the work of other writers and he took a malicious
delight in collecting other poets’ worst lines and using them in conversation. One evening in 1950, at the Stag’s Head, Dylan
read aloud sentences and whole passages from George Barker’s
The Dead Seagull
which struck him as unbearably funny, as they did his audience. In 1953 for one of his many BBC broadcasts, Dylan was to
read a poem by Edith Sitwell. That midday, after rehearsal, Dylan went to the Stag’s Head and did an imitation of Dame Edith
bleating her poetry that had everyone in stitches.

Such was Dylan’s fame – he made over 200 broadcasts for the BBC and several television appearances, most of which the BBC
didn’t bother to keep – that even a decade after Dylan’s death, it was still possible to run into people in the local pubs
who would turn to you at the bar and begin: ‘When I was drinking with Dylan…’ Of course, some of the drinking stories are
deservedly legendary, such as when, in October 1953, during a particularly drunken binge, he lost the only copy of the work
by which he is best remembered,
Under Milk Wood
. His producer at the BBC, Douglas Cleverdon, traced his movements from bar to bar and recovered it from the Admiral Duncan
pub on Old Compton Street.

Dan Davin, who spent a lot of time with Dylan in those days, remembered a day when Dylan met up with Henry Miller, who was
visiting London:

They did a protracted round of the pubs and finished up at the little dairy on Rathbone Place which served sandwiches. The
staff wore white and blue uniforms and the dairy was spotlessly clean but Henry Miller was not only drunk, but also short
sighted, and got it into his head that Dylan had taken him to
some particularly sophisticated brothel. Despite the waitresses protestations and Dylan’s wild attempts to set him straight,
Miller refused to believe otherwise and it took a lot of Welsh tact to avoid the appearance of the police.
¹⁵

Davin has many insights into the man:

In adult life the drive towards the extreme, for he could do nothing by quarters and never drank a half, meant that when he
was not at home writing poetry, one and the most intense pole of his being, he was in the pubs among the hard men. And hard
men they were as long as they lasted: people like Roy Campbell, John Davenport, Louis MacNeice, Bertie Rodgers, Julian Maclaren-Ross,
to name only those whose iron is now rusting in the grave.
¹⁶

Soho is always changing and always stays the same.

GASTON BERLEMONT

Before the war, many artists and writers lived in Fitzrovia, mostly in the streets surrounding Fitzroy Square, but only a
few of them lived in Soho. It has always been a destination and as a consequence is the one constant throughout this book.
With the highest concentration of restaurants and cafés in the country, Soho remains an unchanging stage set, its late-night
clubs and gay bars, its pubs, dives and coffee bars welcoming each new generation, listening to their shouts and tears, their
boasts, their curses and their endless stories.

V J Day was celebrated in August 1945 with an all-night party on the specially reopened rooftop bar of David Tennant’s Gargoyle
Club at 69 Dean Street, Soho. Had Messrs Novello, the sheet music printers, not strengthened the walls and floors to resist
the vibration of heavy printing machinery decades earlier, several nearby bombs might easily have caused the 1732 building
to collapse. As it was, the Gargoyle had stayed open throughout the war; customers would troop down to the cellar to continue
drinking by candlelight if it became particularly ‘noisy’. The club occupied the two new floors added to the top of the building
by the Novellos; beneath that was David Tennant’s own apartment and the club’s wine cellar. The printing works remained on
the ground floor. A narrow side door on Meard Street led to a short dark passage, at the end of which was a tiny rickety elevator
with sliding metal gates to trap fingers and bits of clothing. After an interminable journey upwards, the guests would emerge
from the opposite side of the lift into a hall hung with lithographs by Henri Matisse.

Here were the reception desk, the telephone booth and toilets and seats
for those waiting anxiously for a member to sign them in. Beyond the hall was the bar, the club’s main meeting place, with
its vermilion settees and two Matisse lithographs of ballet girls. To the right, a pair of double doors led to the private
reception room used for banquets and large parties. This had not been used much during the war but was reopened when hostilities
ceased. To the right of the bar was a flight of steps, lined with mirrors, some cracked or missing, leading down to the dance
floor and dining room.

The club had been founded by David Tennant in 1925. The restaurant seated 140 at its scrubbed oak tables and benches. For
the main salon, Tennant had designed a ceiling, inspired by the Alhambra in Granada and painted with 22-carat gold. He described
it to Matisse, who suggested that the walls be completely covered with a mosaic of mirrored glass to give a shimmering effect.
Matisse knew of a chateau with two very large eighteenth-century mirrors for sale. These were cut into thousands of tiles,
each about six inches square, to line the walls. The chair and curtain fabrics were also based on designs by Matisse and his
large 1911 canvas
The Red Studio
had pride of place. The painting spent the duration of the war stored in the basement of the Redfern Gallery, but Tennant
now decided to dispose of it and the Redfern sold it to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it remains. The other
great Matisse from the room,
The Studio, Quai Saint-Michel
(1916), was bought by the predatory Douglas Cooper, who paid a trivial sum for it at a time when Tennant was feeling a financial
pinch. (Now in the Phillips Collection, Washington DC.) However, the dozen lithographs of dancers remained scattered about
the club. Francis Bacon described the effect of people entering the main room: ‘They looked for a moment like birds of paradise
coming down this beautiful gold and silver staircase into what was a multiplicity of mirrors made into a very beautiful room.
I’ve never been a great admirer of Matisse, but this room really worked as a setting.’
¹

Before the war this was home to the Bright Young Things, young men in dinner jackets and flappers in cloche hats dancing the
night away, champagne glasses in hand; now it was shabby and had become the centre of what passed as London bohemia. Tennant
was still in charge and the membership committee included Augustus John – a foundation member – Philip Toynbee and Clive Bell.
The 2,000 or so members each paid four guineas a head (seven for husband and wife); many of them were writers such as Dylan
Thomas, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Angus Wilson, Olivia Manning, Cyril Connolly and Elizabeth Smart. There were photographers like
Lee Miller and many artists. Half the BBC talks department would gather there after work, and MPs such as Tom Driberg would
stroll up to Soho from the House after
a debate. The long-suffering manager was Courtney Merrill, and Charles, from the French region of Haute-Savoie, was maitre
d’. But in the post-war years the formal dress code was relaxed, and hardly anyone wore a dinner jacket. Many of the members
were gay and this contributed a lot to the club’s atmosphere.

Music was provided by the Alec Alexander Quartet, a Greek Cypriot combo who played innocuous dance music that it was possible
to ignore unless they played the Charleston or the Black Bottom for some of the older members to dance to, when they would
increase the volume. The core membership of writers, artists and intellectuals were sometimes pitted against the remnants
of the pre-war fashionable society, known to the regulars as ‘the dentists’, who drove into town for dinner and a show. One
evening a ‘dentist’ approached Lucian Freud, who was sitting minding his own business, pulled him to his feet and landed him
a punch to the jaw shouting: ‘There’s one for you’, and, before anyone could intervene, pulled him to his feet again and gave
him another one, saying: ‘And another one for your beastly old grandfather.’ Clearly Sigmund Freud’s findings had caused some
anxiety in the suburbs.

Although their gossip could be vicious the regular members were often entertaining. On one occasion, Robert Newton, who played
Long John Silver in Byron Haskin’s 1950 movie
Treasure Island
, stripped naked on Alexander’s bandstand and performed an imitation of Long John diving into the sea for a refreshing dip
before dinner. He returned to his table flopped back in his chair and fell asleep, still naked. One of the waiters put a lit
cigar between his teeth. Another Gargoyle regular was the philosopher A. J. Ayer. Ayer: ‘Suddenly, after the war, I developed
and began to know all sorts of people I hadn’t known before – writers, painters and so on. The Gargoyle was very largely responsible
for that… the beginning of my life as a kind of social figure.’ At the Gargoyle the clientele were rude and argumentative
and there were times when the gilt chairs were flung across the room. Francis Bacon particularly enjoyed the arguments: ‘they
were nightly. They went on, not only for hours, they went on for days. It was like one of those instalments where it says
tomorrow you’ll get such and such – well you certainly did at the Gargoyle. It was great fun, really, in spite of the rows.’
²
The Gargoyle occupied much the same position in Soho then as the Groucho Club, also on Dean Street, did from the mid-eighties.

The ladies’ lavatories had full-height mahogany doors, ideal protection for an intimate moment. Lucian Freud was once spotted
leaving one with Henrietta Law (later Moraes). Henrietta – born Audrey Wendy Abbott, renamed
when she married Michael Law – was one of the great energy sources of the place. On one occasion Tony Strickland Hubbard,
a Woolworth’s heir, spun her on the dance floor by her legs, and when he let go she shot between the kilted legs of the painters
Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde and collided head first with Alex’s bass drum, going straight through.

Henrietta Moraes lived just a few doors away in 1951 and went to the Gargoyle all the time:

Every night there would be fighting, insults were lobbed into the air. Brian Howard could lob an insulting remark accurately
as far as twenty yards… Everyone was very critical of one another, but there was a high standard of wit and, provided you
were resilient enough, it would act as a stimulus rather than an inhibitor.
³

Clearly she was not among the inhibited:

I was dancing with Lucian [Freud] in the Gargoyle one night and said to him, ‘I want you.’ We made a date to meet at lunchtime
the next day in a basement off Brewer Street and there consummated, on the edge of an unwieldy kitchen sink, our friendship.
⁴

Next to the Matisse lithographs there was a mural by Johnny Minton (assisted by others), a professor of painting at the Royal
College of Art.
⁵
Whenever Minton entered the dining room, accompanied by his usual entourage of sailors, Alexander always struck up with
‘My Very Good Friend the Milkman Said’ or ‘I’m Gonna Sit Right Down and Write Myself a Letter’ as these were his favourite
tunes. Minton always responded by sending drinks to the band. This was one of the few places where he could take his boyfriends
without fear; the club was tolerant of most things. It was Minton who first introduced Francis Bacon to the Gargoyle in the
late forties, before Bacon’s fame outstripped his own.

Ruthven Todd, in his memoir, wrote:

One person I connect particularly with the Gargoyle is Johnny Minton. In my pictorial memory I have a coloured movie of his
long sad clown’s face, lashed by breakers of dark hair, as he danced a frenetic solo on the otherwise unoccupied dance floor.
His arms and legs were flying this way and that… Clapping and encouraging him was a ringside audience of the faceless nonentities
whom he gathered as an entourage as a magnet does rusty filings.
⁶

Johnny Minton features in many memoirs of the period as a ‘character’. John Lehmann, the editor of
Penguin New Writing
and a well-known poet,
novelist and literary critic, described his face as having an ‘element of the grotesque in its narrow axe-like boniness under
the untidy mop of black hair – a face seen in an elongating fun-fair mirror’.
⁷

Henrietta Moraes was his best friend. They never had an affair but they were always together. She did, however, sometimes
try his patience. He fell in love with an amateur wrestler and bodybuilder called Norman, who moved in with Minton at 9 Apollo
Place, a two-storey building in a cul-de-sac off Cheyne Walk, originally bought with money inherited from his mother. Henrietta:
‘After some party or other, I found myself with Norman and without a thought we became lovers. This lighthearted affair continued
for some time until Johnny found out, and then there was an uproar.’
⁸
Despite this, she was the person closest to Minton and he left her his house in his will. With few exceptions like Norman,
Johnny preferred the company of sailors, in particular one called Arnie, from Hull, but he often had great groups of them,
attracted by his wealth.

Minton’s colleague at the RCA, Rodrigo Moynihan, was another regular, along with his wife, Elinor. Rodrigo was a society painter
and Elinor essentially painted chocolate box art, but they lived a bohemian life with many affairs and liaisons. They moved
into 155 Old Church Street, near the Chelsea Arts Club, in the autumn of 1945, when the area was still suffering from the
war: the houses across the street had been demolished by a landmine and the Fulham Road was still a mass of ruins from the
blitz. They decorated their walls with paintings by themselves and their friends, and also with etchings by Whistler and Goya.
They ran an open house and Colin MacInnes, Louis MacNeice, Ben Nicholson and the writer Elizabeth Taylor could all be found
in their living room, drinking cocktails and listening to Frank Sinatra records.