Up West (7 page)

One of the things that made me want to write about the West End's residents, as opposed to its vast array of visitors, was the sheer resilience shown by its people and the dogged propensity to reach for their goals through persistent hard work. Perhaps it is because so many West End families arrived Up West from somewhere else that it was in their nature to try new things, to roll up their sleeves and get stuck in. It takes courage and a pioneering spirit to begin again in a foreign country with strange customs and using an unfamiliar language.

The Camisa brothers exemplify this. ‘My father, Ennio, and his brother, my Uncle Isidoro, came over in about 1920,' Alberto Camisa told me. ‘My father was thirteen and his brother sixteen. There was no work in Italy.' Despite not knowing the language, the brothers worked hard enough for their aunt to start them up in their own shop in Old Compton Street. Things were ticking along nicely until the Camisa brothers were marched out of their shop to the internment camps in the Isle of Man. When they saw the shop again, four years later, it belonged to someone else.

Eventually, the brothers took on a building in Berwick Street that the bombs had left semi-derelict. Fratelli Camisa rose again and with an enormous input of hard work, determination and staying power, they built their business up until it was one of the premier West End delicatessens and importers of Italian food and wine.

Theirs is not a unique story: Peppino Leoni rebuilt his beloved Quo Vadis restaurant after returning from the Isle of Man, and locals of every creed, colour and origin picked themselves up, dusted themselves off and started all over again. So that was another effect of the war; it made people work hard, to try to get back what they had had before. It taught them to buckle down. No wonder that almost every story I heard as I was growing up was rooted in time by reference to it. ‘Before the war', ‘During the war' or ‘Just after the war': these words resonate through absolutely everything.

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This picture forms the cover of ‘
Blitz over Westminster
' by Roy Harrison. A caption notes that ‘Extra Police were called in to stop looting after this raid.'

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See
Soho
by Judith Summers.

People from outside London, and indeed from other parts of the capital, know the West End as a playground or tourist destination, somewhere you go for shops, sights, shows and nights on the razzle. The streets are thronged with office-workers by day and theatre, cinema, restaurant and club-goers by night. It rarely occurs to these visitors that anyone actually lives there, apart from the odd posh person: of course, the Queen has her place at the end of the Mall, and the Prime Minister is handily placed for a trip to the cinema, while presumably someone sometimes lurks behind the curtains and shutters of the genteel town houses in Mayfair, Knightsbridge, St James's and the Adelphi.

Even today, though, ordinary people live in the West End, usually above the ground floor or tucked away in side streets, or down back alleys. In the post-war decades, there were far more of them. Tens of thousands of native West
Enders lived their lives largely out of sight, often in cramped and poky flats above the shops, cafés and restaurants set in the Georgian terraces that lined the streets of Soho and the West End. Although most of these had been built as family homes, very few remained in single occupancy by the end of the Second World War. There were also some late Victorian tenement houses on the Charing Cross side, such as Newport Dwellings (also known as Newport Buildings) and Sandringham Buildings – but very few houses.

Some Covent Gardeners also lived ‘above the shop' in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings, or in houses that had long ago been converted into flats. The area contained a great deal of what we now call social housing. This was built following the slum clearances of the 1870s and 1880s, when the Metropolitan Board of Works used compulsory purchase orders to sweep away the worst of the slums defacing the West End. At the same time they created new streets, including Shaftesbury Avenue, Kingsway, Aldwych and the Charing Cross Road. There were several blocks of flats in private ownership, others run by the London County Council, and two Peabody estates. The last were built with funds provided by a London-based American banker and philanthropist, George Peabody, in the late nineteenth century to house London's ‘respectable' (or employed) poor.

One of the Peabody estates was in Wild Street, just to the east of Drury Lane, and the other was in Bedfordbury, which runs parallel to St Martin's Lane. Wild Street was one of the largest of the Peabody estates, with 347 tenements in thirteen
blocks, while in Bedfordbury, five blocks were squeezed in to a much smaller site. Both had a higher density of tenants than their equivalents in the East End, because the clearances of the Covent Garden ‘rookeries' – a generic term for areas where tall, decrepit houses were crowded along dark access alleys no more than three or four feet wide – had displaced so many people.
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Despite the great size of many Victorian families, the tenement flats in both the Peabody and LCC blocks tended to be small. Some were just bedsits, and in most the kitchen – equipped with a coal-fired range (also known as a ‘black grate') or gas cooker – also served as the living room and an auxiliary bedroom. Every flat shared a toilet, sink and wash-house with the other flats on their landing. There were no bathrooms. Graham Jackson ‘used to have friends in Sandringham Buildings in Charing Cross Road, by Cambridge Circus. They were little tiny flats, and my father used to say you could sit on the toilet, cook your breakfast and have a shave at the same time.' The cramped flats and narrow corridors afforded young Graham and his pals the opportunity for mischief: ‘The doors used to face each other and we'd tie the knockers together, knock on one door, and of course the woman would open the door, and when she closed it, she'd knock on the door opposite, and so it went on.'

The converted flats in Soho were no bigger, and often no
better appointed, than those in the tenements. Toilets were rarely put inside houses, while bathrooms were very much a luxury fitting in new houses until well in to the twentieth century: they were rarely plumbed into old houses and flats until after the Second World War. The age of the housing stock in Soho and Covent Garden meant that Victorian conditions persisted well into the fifties, and those interviewed for this book often remembered not only their first bathroom, but also the replacement of gas lighting with electricity in the fifties.

My father's flat, at 61 Old Compton Street, was three floors above a delicatessen. The front door, set between the deli and what, in 1956, became the famous 2I's coffee bar, gave on to a steep, dark staircase that wound up to a flat that had been intended as the servants' quarters when the house was built a century and more earlier. There was a small living room and bedroom at the front, with sloping walls and ceilings following the roof line. At the back, a room had been converted into a tiny bathroom with an Ascot (a gas water heater that exploded into life at the turn of the hot tap), and there was a kitchen with a gas cooker. The kitchen also served as a dining room, although I remember the kitchen table more as Father's desk, with his typewriter, untidy piles of paper and ashtrays overflowing with the oval stubs of the Passing Clouds he smoked when in funds. At the front, the windows looked out on the rooftops of Old Compton Street and Wardour Street beyond, and at the back they provided a view of St Anne's churchyard.

I have many memories of the stream of visitors passing through this small flat, including Father's drinking and gambling buddies, fellow writers, criminals and celebrities, but one of my most treasured is of feeding a pigeon that came every day to the kitchen windowsill for his breadcrumbs and crusts. I christened him ‘Crooky', because of his distinctive bent beak. Perhaps the spookiest experience I had while researching this book came during the interview with Chas McDevitt, who briefly lived in the top floor of number 59, next door. He volunteered that he used to feed what was obviously the very same bird, although he dubbed him Ikey.

Jeff Sloneem spent the first eight years of his life just across the road from Father's flat. ‘I lived in 62 Old Compton Street, above a greengrocery. We were on the second floor, and basically, you walked in, there was a living room with a kitchen, a little back room, then there was a bedroom, and that was it. It was part of a Georgian terrace that came to an end at my uncle's tailor's shop.' The part of the terrace beyond Jeff's uncle's shop had been blitzed.

Some of the tall, narrow houses above shops or cafés were split between flats and businesses, legitimate and otherwise, which meant that Soho families shared their space with the workrooms of jobbing tailors, tiny offices or perhaps a working girl or two. Janet Vance's situation was typical: ‘I grew up at 11 Frith Street on the corner of Bateman Street, diagonally opposite the Dog and Duck. It was a café with flats above, and my dad had a gambling club in the basement. There were two flats on the first floor, two on our floor, and one at the
top. Girls, prostitutes, lived in the other flat on our floor, but they didn't interfere with anybody, or work from there. Different girls worked from the two flats on the first floor.'

Ronnie Brace never lived in Soho, but used to visit his mother's sister in Windmill Street. ‘My aunt lived about 30 yards past the Windmill on the right-hand side. She had a flat, one bedroom, small rooms, on the second floor; I remember walking up the rickety stairs. She worked for a Jewish tailor who had a workroom on another floor and she would work there, or bring stuff into the flat. She used to repair clothes, trousers.'

Chas McDevitt had several flats in the West End. ‘In '58, I lived at the Cambridge Circus end of Old Compton Street above what became a dirty book shop, but was then just a closed-up shopfront, on the second floor. I looked there about fifteen, twenty years later and they still hadn't changed the curtains! Filthy things, they were. I was on the road a lot, so it was just a place to crash. There was virtually a brothel next door, and when the girls knew I was leaving to get married, they wanted to know if they could have my flat.'

For John Carnera and his family, their Soho flat came with a job attached. ‘I landed in England on 1 March 1947 with my mother and brother, and we went to live in 45 Dean Street. My father worked at Gennaro's restaurant, and we had the second and third floor above – well, 44 was actually the restaurant, 45 was a bar leading into it, and we were above that. We lived there for twelve years, above what became the Groucho Club.

‘On the first floor, above the restaurant in 44, there was another large dining room, which was used for functions, and in 45 the first floor was a changing room for the waiters and whatever. The second floor was our bedrooms, and then on the top floor we had our front room and kitchen.

‘In the early fifties, the Gennaros kindly built us a bathroom. Before that, we used to use the restaurant's toilets, and wash there. We had to go down to the first floor, through the banqueting room – which was usually empty – to get to the cloakrooms. So that was not convenient. You had to time going to the toilet when the restaurant wasn't open. You were looking at the morning, between three in the afternoon and six in the evening, and then after eleven at night. Imagine that!'

Owen Gardner's family home also came with his father's job: ‘We moved from Somerset to live in Upper St Martin's Lane in Christmas 1946, and were there for ten years. My father worked for Page's, the caterers' suppliers in Shaftesbury Avenue, and the family lived over Page's main warehouse, which occupied a whole block.

‘Before the war, the buildings belonged to Aldridges' Horse Repository.
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During the war, the building was used as a garage for the NAAFI, and they had it completely altered. Page's took it on after the war as a warehouse. Our flat on the
first floor was all converted offices. Our toilet had “Ladies Toilet” painted in gold on the door. It was difficult to find anywhere to live in those days, just after the war; although these were just offices, we didn't mind.'

The lack of housing was a pressing problem in the years immediately following the Second World War. In the East End and the suburbs, prefabricated houses (‘prefabs') were built on land cleared by the devastating Blitz years, but these were not provided for West End people whose homes had ‘copped it'. As a result of this, those West Enders who did have a place to live hung on to it. Peter Jenkins's father was the Superintendent of the Wild Street Peabody Buildings in the late forties and the fifties. ‘In post-war London, if you got a flat you were in clover,' he remembers. ‘And you didn't do anything to jeopardize that tenancy. You didn't do any deals on the side; that would get you evicted. You didn't sublet – that was one of the strict rules. You couldn't have a lodger. You couldn't co-habit, you had to be married. In all those years I lived there, I can hardly remember a crime at all. You would have been out on your ear.'

It was not just that people were worried about finding somewhere else to live. The tenement buildings themselves inspired a great deal of love, as Sonia Boulter testified. ‘Newport Buildings was a tenement building but I loved it. I sobbed my heart out when I left. I didn't move out of there until I was thirty-one, when they pulled it down. I didn't want to move. My parents were born there, my brothers were all born there, and so was I, in 1940. Actually in the Buildings.'

Ann Lee, who lived in the Wild Street Peabody Buildings, also remembers how living close to one another fostered a feeling of togetherness. ‘The Buildings were a very close-knit community. There were eleven blocks all together – J and K block got bombed during the war – and about twenty-five flats in each. Some were one bedroom, some were two. Some were what they called a bedsit, just one room, set in the middle of the landing.'