London Calling (8 page)

The Colony Room Club at 41 Dean Street was originally the first-floor reception room of a domestic dwelling built in 1731
though now much altered. The space retained its domestic proportions which is perhaps why people felt so at home there. Muriel
sat perched on a high chair at the far left of the bar, next to the door, head tilted back to display her fine aquiline nose,
imperiously waving a cigarette in a long holder as she barked ‘Members only!’ at anyone she didn’t recognize. This was quickly
followed by ‘Fuck off!’ if they did not turn immediately to leave, followed by ‘Get a face-lift on the way.’ Members, however,
were welcomed with an endearing: ‘Hello, cunty!’ She was a formidable presence; one afternoon a local gangster entered the
club looking to set her up for protection money but he had barely announced his purpose before Muriel screamed: ‘Fuck off,
cunt!’ so loudly that he backed out of the door and down the stairs.

The bar had a bamboo front with a bamboo screen above and potted plants above the gin bottles and shelves. There was a row
of barstools with mock leopard skin seats and a green carpet. Muriel’s girlfriend Carmel was Jamaican and the decor was supposed
to suggest a Caribbean ‘colony’ theme. The walls started off cream-coloured but became so stained by nicotine that in the
mid-fifties Muriel painted them in green gloss, renewed regularly. Michael Wojas celebrated the new millennium by painting
them one shade lighter, which upset some of the old-timers. There were curtains and lace curtains prevented anyone from seeing
in from across the street. There was no clock because otherwise drinkers would always be thinking about the train they had
to catch. Muriel had a licence to open from three in the afternoon at a time when pubs closed at 2.30. She closed at 11 p.
m., like a normal pub. It would have been possible to extend the licence until one o’clock, but as Michael Wojas, manager
of the Colony Room from 1994 until 2008, recalled: ‘Muriel always said that by 11 the punters are pissed and skint and we’ve
had the best from them. Send them on their way and let someone else cope with them.’
⁶
An attitude summed
up by the club’s attractive motto: ‘Rush up, drink up, spend up, fuck off.’ He explained:

It’s a perfect space; it’s very well worked out. Muriel would sit by the bar in her special seat. If you keep the mirrors
clear you can see what’s going on behind you without having to twist your neck round. You can talk to people at the bar and
you’re in contact with whoever’s behind the bar. You’re also right by the door just in case someone you don’t want comes walking
in. You don’t want the music too loud, you need to hear everything.
⁷

Muriel’s initial clientele included many of the gay military men from the Music Box and her girlfriend, Carmel, had many gay
friends who quickly joined, but there was no intention of making it into a gay club. The Colony was one of the few places
where it was safe to be openly homosexual but Muriel was looking for an interesting mix. Encouraging Francis Bacon to introduce
his friends was a master touch; even though, as she said: ‘I know fuck all about art’
⁸
, Muriel had a good eye for people and knew that artists would add excitement and atmosphere to the club. Bacon loved it there
and told Dan Farson: ‘It’s a place where you can lose your inhibitions. It’s different from anywhere else. After all, that’s
what we all want isn’t it? A place to go where one feels free and easy.’
⁹
John Minton described it as ‘like being in an enormous bed, with drinks’.
¹⁰
The evil-smelling Canadian poet Paul Potts introduced a chapter in
Dante Called You Eurydice
with a dedication: ‘For Muriel Belcher, because of many not so small kindnesses, and one very big one, over a very long period
of time.’
¹¹
Potts told Daniel Farson: ‘The relatively small room which is her domain and where she is absolute sovereign must be one
of the most unique rooms anywhere. It is not like other clubs at all, more like a continuous cocktail party.’
¹²

Muriel was not the only entertainment at the club; there was a black café society pianist, Mike Mackenzie, who tinkled away
at ‘We’ll Have Manhattan’ or ‘These Foolish Things’ or ‘Give Me the Simple Life’ and ‘On the Sunny Side of the Street’. When
he left, his place was taken by Ted Dicks, who studied under John Minton at the Royal College and shared rooms with another
Royal College student, Len Deighton, who was then studying to be a book illustrator. Minton loved the Colony, which quickly
replaced the Gargoyle for him when it was sold in 1952. At the Colony, Minton and Bacon would vye with each other in buying
bottles of champagne but whenever possible they stayed out of each other’s way. Minton was less able to contain himself, probably
because, though he was a highly regarded artist in the forties, he was not seen as developing his talent whereas Bacon was
slowly becoming recognized
as a genius, so that today no-one has heard of Minton and Bacon is thought of as a giant in post-war British painting. Even
in the early fifties, Bacon was seen to have depth and vision whereas Minton’s work was little more than attractive illustration.
But for both of them it was a haven, a home where they could let down their guard, though Bacon was described by Dom Moraes
as having a ‘curiously anxious look’ as he leaned against the bar in jeans and sweater. Moraes: ‘The eyes always seemed watchful,
though the strong round face often broke into laughter, or frowned with sudden concentration. Bacon had extremely good manners…
He gave an impression of great strength and great aloofness: when most kindly he seemed also most remote.’
¹³

Inevitably, the Colony Room is now most associated in people’s minds with Francis Bacon. Bacon was a painter of figures in
rooms, and it was rare that Bacon himself was not enclosed by four walls, in his studio, at the French or the tiny space of
the Colony Room. He needed that sense of enclosure, that was where everything important happened in his life.

In the forties Bacon lived at 7 Cromwell Place near South Kensington tube station, a large studio which had previously belonged
to Sir John Millais. The cavernous room was sparsely furnished with worn velvet sofas and divans and faded chintz. Two huge
Waterford chandeliers hung from the ceiling, giving an air of faded Edwardian grandeur to the scene. There was a dais for
a model, upon which stood an enormous easel. Here he held illegal gambling sessions, presided over by his old nanny, who slept
on the kitchen table. His friend Michael Wishart enjoyed visiting the studio and recorded some of his observations:

Seated on the edge of his bath I enjoyed watching Francis make up his face. He applied the basic foundation with lightning
dexterity born of long practice. He was more careful, even sparing, with the rouge. For his hair he had a selection of Kiwi
boot polishes in various browns. He blended these on the back of his hand, selecting a tone appropriate for the particular
evening, and brushed them through his abundant hair with a shoe brush. He polished his teeth with Vim. He looked remarkably
young even before this alchemy.
¹⁴

When Michael Wishart married the painter Anne Dunn in 1950, the party was held in Bacon’s studio. He painted the chandeliers
crimson for the occasion and tinted his face a delicate shade of pink. Wishart invited 200 guests and provided 200 bottles
of Bollinger but Ian Board had to quickly bring more supplies from the Colony Room. Anne’s roommate Sod was maid of honour.
Sod, known during the war as ‘the bugger’s Vera Lynn’ for her drinking club catering to gay servicemen, liked to lie on the
divan naked, sleeping off her
morning intake of gin while Anne’s Australian fruit bat hung upside down above her, squirting everything with jets of diarrhoea.
¹⁵
Muriel Belcher, Graham Sutherland and others were all guests and the party continued for two days and three nights. Francis
gave the couple 100 Waterford glasses as a wedding present. David Tennant described it as ‘the first real party since the
war’.

Bacon’s father was a horse breeder and loved to hunt and was consequently very disappointed in young Bacon’s aversion to horses
and the countryside in general. He never seems to have made the connection between his son’s asthma attacks and the presence
of dogs and horses. According to Lady Caroline Blackwood, a homosexual friend of hers told her that Bacon had revealed that
his father had arranged for his son ‘to be systematically and viciously horsewhipped by his Irish grooms’. Bacon told Dan
Farson that he had been ‘broken in’ by ‘several’ of his father’s grooms and stable lads when he was about fifteen.
¹⁶
He hated Ireland and developed a neurotic asthma attack whenever he boarded a plane to go there even though he was able to
fly anywhere else. Perhaps not surprisingly, given his upbringing, Bacon was a masochist. He enjoyed being whipped but the
S&M sessions, fuelled by alcohol, not infrequently got out of hand and it was not unusual for him to show up at the Colony
covered in cuts and bruises which he explained away as a slip on the bathroom floor.

Bacon belongs with the greats of the School of Paris: Picasso’s
Desmoiselles
d
’
Avignon
, Soutine’s carcasses, Modigliani, Degas, whose late pastels he particularly admired. There is a formal beauty in his canvases
that is in tension with the convulsions of the images within so that no matter how grotesque, how distorted or abbreviated
the subject matter, the sheer painterly qualities of its execution seduces the eye. He is a master painter, true to oils,
no plastic for him. His manipulation of the picture plane is unerring. He is a gorgeous colourist in the manner of Matisse,
his translucent flesh tones are as good as Ingres and there is a sensual quality to his brushstrokes – the tonking and scrubbing
– that brings to mind De Kooning, Bonnard and the reds of Courbet.

Bacon’s
Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion
was exhibited at the Lefevre Gallery on New Bond Street in the first week of April 1945, four weeks before the defeat of
Germany, as part of a group show which included Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and Matthew Smith. The public reaction was
one of shock and horror: the screaming nameless creatures, one of which had soiled bandages wrapped around its blinded eyes
but which had turned to face the viewer, caused the utmost consternation. The full facts of the Nazi
horror, the concentration camps, the mass hangings of Russian peasants, the rape and torture were just beginning to emerge.
It was clear that nothing was ever going to be the same again: Europe had changed irreversibly.

The human condition was Bacon’s subject matter:

It’s something that lies long and far below what is called coherence and consciousness, and one hopes the greatest art is
a kind of valve in which very many hidden things of human feeling and destiny are trapped – something that can’t be definitely
and directly said… the whole coagulation of pain, despair.
¹⁷

He believed that ‘There is an area of the nervous system to which the texture of paint communicates more violently than anything
else.’
¹⁸
He thought the essence of ourselves is buried deep in the unconscious and can only be dragged into consciousness and given
form by stealth: the use of controlled accident or trance states. In the early days he frequented medical bookshops, looking
for material illustrating extreme emotional states. When he was very young, in the mid-1930s, he bought a secondhand medical
book,
Diseases of the Mouth
, in Paris; beautiful hand-coloured plates depicted the open mouth and the examination of its inside surfaces. Bacon told
David Sylvester: ‘They fascinated me, and I was obsessed by them.’ He retained a few pages of hand-coloured illustrations
from it to the end of his life. Another book, called
Positioning in Radiography
, was also very influential.

Over the years he assembled a collection of several thousand photographs and was able to put his hand on the one he wanted
even though they were often torn and paint-spattered. ‘I think of myself as a kind of pulverizing machine into which everything
I look at and feel is fed. I believe that I am different from the mix-media jackdaws who use photographs etc. more of less
literally or cut them up and rearrange them.’
¹⁹
Bacon thought that the pop artists did not digest and transform their material sufficiently for any really new powerful images
to emerge. He thought that photographs were so strong and literal then even if only a fragment was used it would prevent any
personal vision from emerging. Bacon: ‘In my case the photographs become a sort of compost out of which images emerge from
time to time. These images may be partly conditioned by the mood of the material which has gone into the pulverizer.’
²⁰
It was not just still photography that interested him: Eadweard Muybridge’s
The Human Figure in Motion
was very influential, as was Eisenstein’s 1925 film
Battleship Potemkin
, with its famous scene of the nurse with the smashed spectacles on the staircase. Fragments of all these images appeared
in his work.

Bacon and his circle were by no means the only artists working in London in the immediate post-war period. Some of the most
interesting were the remnants of the pre-war Surrealist group, a movement which still had some life in it in 1945, largely
through the efforts of Roland Penrose and the ICA and of the Belgian Surrealist E. L. T. Mesens (Edouard Léon Théodore),
whose London Surrealist Group met every Monday night in the private dining room of the Barcelona Restaurant at 17 Beak Street,
Soho. Mesens’ collages are now highly regarded, but at the time he was much better known as an editor and exhibition organizer.
Throughout the war years he worked for the Belgian service of the BBC and in 1945 reopened his London Gallery, featuring Surrealist
works. Short, a little overweight, his thinning black hair oiled and brushed back, meticulously shaved and manicured, fastidiously
clean, Mesens was described by George Melly as looking like ‘a somewhat petulant baby’ or ‘a successful continental music-hall
star’.
²¹
He dressed conventionally in suit and tie, his shoes highly polished, his only Continental mannerism being to splash himself
with expensive cologne which in those days was a habit confined almost exclusively to homosexuals and very much frowned upon.
²²
His wife Sybil was in her mid-thirties when Melly met them. She had olive skin and fine aquiline features. She was fashionably
well dressed, unusual just after the war, but had a gypsyish air about her that Melly found very attractive.