Up West (28 page)

Gerry's in Shaftesbury Avenue was the last of his clubs. Its members included Michael Caine, Keith Waterhouse and
Tony Hancock. Everyone seems to have loved Campion for his generous nature. Show business types down on their luck could always count on him to provide food and drink on tick for as long as it was necessary. Owen Gardner's job in Page's catering supply shop next to Gerry's remembers it well. ‘You went downstairs in the basement there. It was there for donkey's years, a drinking club where theatrical people could go and know that they could have a drink with their own type, their own kind, and not get bothered.'

Gambling also brought stars and supporting players to Soho. Harry Fowler, a stalwart of British cinema and television who rarely starred, but turned up in virtually everything that featured a cheeky London chappie or a bit of a spiv, could usually be tracked down to a smoky spieler (illegal gambling club) or snooker hall, or to the kitchen of our flat, where he'd play cards with Father and his cronies.

Dennis Shaw, the ubiquitous heavy in any production requiring a really scary villain, was another Soho
habitué
. I remember him vividly, because he always frightened me into hiding behind my father's legs when we met in the street, although he was never, ever unkind to me – in fact, quite the opposite. I realize now that his ability to terrify small children just by standing there must have upset him, despite the fact that his looks were what earned him his living. He was a large man with dark hair swept straight back from a low, low forehead and a heavy, warty, moley, jowly face that could frighten the dead into life. Dennis was also a gambling man, who, like Father, enjoyed a punt on the gee-gees. He
could often be found propping up the counter in the betting shop, once they were finally made legal, his ugly mug buried deep in the racing pages.

Soho also attracted the stars of the sporting world. Freddie Mills's distinctive, much-broken nose marked him out as a pugilist immediately. He was the light-heavyweight world boxing champ between 1948 and 1950, and this made him a darling of the media and a sporting hero to millions. He stayed in the public eye long after his boxing career was over, thanks to the newspapers, Pathé News, and small parts in several films, including two of the
Carry On
series. He was a jewel thief in
Carry On Constable
(1960), and Lefty in
Carry On Regardless
(1961). Just about everyone knew Freddie's face, whether they liked boxing or not. His ownership of Freddie Mills Chinese Restaurant, at 143 Charing Cross Road, made him a West End ‘face'. Later, he turned the restaurant into a nightclub, called, with great originality, Freddie Mills Nite Spot.

Father knew him fairly well from the snooker hall and various spielers, nightclubs and drinking clubs in the area. Freddie seemed to like children. He had two daughters of his own, Susan and Amanda, and he always slipped me half a crown whenever he saw me. Freddie's life ended tragically early in Goslett Yard at the rear of his club. He was found dead in the back of his Citroën, shot in the head with a rifle. His death was ruled a suicide, although there was no note and his business partner and his family testified he had seemed fine just hours before. Nobody ever discovered any reason
why he should take his own life, although there were a great many rumours at the time and more have surfaced since. His good friends, the Kray twins, always maintained that he was murdered by members of a Chinese tong who were intent on taking over his nightclub.

Another well-known sportsman and Soho
habitué
was Bert Assirati, who was very famous in his day as a British and European wrestling champion. Although he fought as a heavyweight, he was short and stocky, a professional strongman, who worked from time to time as a bouncer in Soho. He was unpredictable, and could turn from edgy affability to charging bull in the twinkling of an eye, a character trait that unnerved not only me but those he faced in the wrestling ring, as well as the local hard men. He was such a ferocious competitor that many potential opponents refused to wrestle with him.

Despite his enormous strength and frightening temper, his wife, Marjorie, a small woman, was able to keep him under control. Father reported that, on another occasion, he turned a corner just in time to see tiny Mrs Assirati, hands on hips, berating Bert. He had picked up several stone paving slabs from a pile waiting to be laid and had raised them above his head ready to crown some cowering unfortunate who had displeased him. After a choice mouthful from his spouse, he lowered the slabs sheepishly and placed them tidily back on the pile before allowing himself to be led away like a naughty schoolboy.

One day in the mid fifties, I was out walking with
Father and some of his ‘business associates'. One of them, Campanini, said something that hit Bert's top note, and the wrestler lifted him way above his head and tossed him over a high wall. A crashing, tinkling sound was followed by startled shrieks, a spluttered ‘I say,' and gabbled apologies in charmingly broken English. Campanini's head appeared above the wall, festooned with bits of hard-boiled egg, cress and cake. He'd landed in the middle of someone's tea party. As he jumped down in to the street, apparently unharmed, pieces of shattered china rained from his ruined clothes and a pair of sugar tongs clattered to the pavement.

‘Momento,' muttered Campanini, who picked up the tongs and heaved himself up the wall again. With another apology, he dropped the tongs in to the garden, saying, ‘I return these to you.'

By this time, the host of the party had barged through a door set in the wall ready to remonstrate with the perpetrator of this outrage, but reassessed the situation when he clapped eyes on Bert. The sight of Campanini dripping with tea had, though, done much to restore Bert's good humour, and after a hasty whip-round he paid for the breakages with a crisp white fiver and change.

Primo Carnera, who became heavyweight boxing champion of the world in 1933, was another sporting hero whose face was well known in the West End. He was not easy to overlook, as he was 6' 6” tall and muscular with it. When Primo's vast frame was spotted ambling through Soho's narrow streets he drew the local children – especially
the Italians – like a magnet. After his boxing career ended, he turned to wrestling and to acting. His role as Python Macklin in the popular
A Kid For Two Farthings
in 1955 made his face familiar to many a British household. His nephew, John Carnera, distinctly remembers having an unscheduled, fascinating day off school to visit his uncle on the set.

Among the West End's Italian population and in his native Italy, Primo was revered in much the same way as top international footballers are today. He would visit Soho every year to see his brother, Secundo, and his family. John remembers his Uncle Primo as a prodigious drinker: much to John's mother's distress, he always led Secundo astray, dragging him around too many West End watering holes while he was in town. Primo died in America, aged sixty, of kidney and liver failure, although he outlived his hardworking younger brother.

You really had to be there to know just how truly dreadful food was in Britain in the late forties and fifties – and, some would say, for decades after that. Frankly, we English were the laughing stock of Europe when it came to our cuisine. We were so notorious for our lousy victuals that it is only comparatively recently that we have even begun to live it down. There was some excuse during the Second World War: times were trying, supplies were meagre and minds were very busy with other things, such as worrying about our fighting men and boys, keeping Hitler on his side of the English Channel, dodging doodlebugs and making do and mending.

‘There's a war on, you know,' was the standard reply to timid complaints about the food in cafés and restaurants between 1939 and 1945. Rationing carried on being the excuse for a good while afterwards, and even after it ended, standards didn't improve much. We'd become used to eating
badly – we'd all been trained up on school dinners after all, and there was no sterner test. The meals provided by all of the schools that I attended were brought by van in large metal containers and by the time they were served up were tepid and laced with congealed fat. Anything green, which usually meant cabbage, was reduced to a soggy blob on the side of the plate. Mashed potato came with hard lumps, often grey in colour: these were used as missiles to be flicked at enemies and friends alike while teacher's back was turned. Many a café, buffet and restaurant produced food to a remarkably similar standard, although the spud missiles tended not to fly in cafés quite as readily as they did at school.

J. Lyons & Co. was a rare exception, in that it provided some of the best plain food of those times. There were three basic kinds of outlets: Lyons Corner Houses, Maison Lyons and the tea shops that later became among the very first self-service cafés. They owned other enterprises as well, but the places affectionately known as ‘Joe Lyons' teashops' are what they remain famous for, long after the last of their kind closed its doors for ever. The company always aimed to provide good food at reasonable prices and cooked in immaculately clean kitchens.
*

Most reasonably sized affluent towns with a large middle class had the boon and blessing that was a Joe Lyons Corner House. These were huge buildings with restaurants on several floors, all served by a central kitchen. The food was schlepped by ‘Nippies', highly trained, silver service waitresses clad in black dresses, white aprons and caps. A national institution in their own right, Nippies were so famous, and so instantly recognizable, that their various uniforms over the years were made in children's sizes so that little girls could play ‘dressing up' and aspire to becoming a Nippy themselves.

London had three Corner Houses, all in the West End. The first was in Coventry Street. Later, others opened in the Strand and Tottenham Court Road. The poshest Lyons outlets were the two Maison Lyons, one at Marble Arch and one in Shaftesbury Avenue. The musicians and Nippies were set in sumptuous surroundings: I remember loads of greenery and stylized fake palms at the Marble Arch Maison.

Meals in a Corner House or Maison Lyons were usually accompanied by live music from the sort of piano trio I always thought of as Annie Crumpet's Tea-time Three, or a small orchestra, playing light classics and the popular music of the day. Each floor of the Corner Houses had a name like ‘Grill and Cheese', ‘Bacon and Egg', ‘Restful Tray', ‘Brasserie' and ‘A La Carte'.

The tea shops were much more basic, but still knocked out decent snacks, a choice of maybe two cooked meals and, of course, teas, buns, cakes, ice cream sundaes and all sorts of things on toast, including baked beans, sardines, eggs and
tomatoes. At one time, there were eleven Lyons outlets in Oxford Street alone. As always with the English at the time, the difference between eateries was a class thing. Anyone in the lower middle class or a bit above could nip into a tea shop when out shopping, but the Corner Houses were a touch more genteel.

Of course, anyone with the money to pay could use them, or the Maisons, but the Corner Houses were aimed at those who considered themselves ‘a cut above', being at the top of the middle-class tree. Corner Houses had a food hall on the ground floor where various Lyons products were sold, including chocolates, preserves and many more grocery items from across the Empire. But they never sold the leaf tea that they served in the cafés and restaurants, a special blend that was unique to them and which, they boasted, produced the very best cuppa to be had anywhere. Lyons also anticipated the home delivery service offered by pizza parlours today – they delivered food anywhere in the Central London area twice daily.

Sonia Boulter remembers her local Lyons Corner House fondly: ‘In those days it used to be a shop, a grocer's shop, and you used to go down Sunday and buy a French cream sandwich for two and six. My dad would say, when we were a bit older, “There's some money, go and buy a cake,” on Sunday. I remember there was live music; you'd go upstairs to the Brasserie I think it was, there was someone playing a piano. Now it's an amusement arcade.' The Trocadero Restaurant on the corner of Shaftesbury Avenue and Windmill Street
was then a J. Lyons enterprise, although it had opened its doors in 1896 and finally closed them in 1965. The building is still there, and still called the Trocadero, but the inside has changed beyond all recognition.

I remember spending many a happy hour scoffing in Joe Lyons with my mother, my grandma and a variety of great-aunts. The demise of the Lyons empire was a real loss to us all. As it is, they are remembered with nostalgic affection by anyone who ever noshed a toasted teacake, a banana split, a boiled syrup roll, or sautéed kidneys, or who supped a reviving cuppa in any of their tea shops or Corner Houses.

‘At the end of the Second World War, catering was a kind of visual and nutritional desert between the works canteen and the Ritz,' Ken and Kate Bayne noted in an article written in 1966. This was true, with the exception of Joe Lyons and their much smaller, and snootier, rival, Fuller's Tea Rooms. Things were so bad on the food front that, in 1951, the journalist, campaigner and gourmet, Raymond Postgate, launched the
Good Food Guide
in an attempt to give the long-suffering British public a definitive guide to where to find edible fare. To this end, he enlisted the aid of family, friends and the readers of his column.

He started off by writing articles inviting readers to send in their recommendations of places where eating could be classed as the pleasure it should be, rather than the endurance test it usually was. His aim was not only to help the public to find something good to eat, but also to encourage chefs and cooks to try harder. Readers responded enthusiastically, and
eventually he had collected enough information to launch the first edition of the guide. A grateful public fell on the book with glad cries of joy. Postgate was neither knighted nor sainted for his efforts, but in the opinion of many he should have been because restaurateurs – posh and humble, and those between – began to strive to gain entry in to the guide. Thus Britain began its slow progress towards good dining. Those restaurants, inns, hotels and cafés that achieved the status of an entry in the guides strained to stay there. This was good for business, and it was good for the taste buds and stomachs of those who cared.