Up West (36 page)

The sources of the perfume – Evening in Paris or Carnation – were the ‘Ladies of the Night', who were often on the streets in broad daylight. They fascinated me then, and have lingered long in my memory. In those days, many a doorway and most of the street corners of Soho had their complement of ‘tarts', as they were often known. While my father was
exchanging ideas, information, insults and drinks with his cronies, or erotic literature for hard cash with his customers, I was free to watch the people loitering, hurrying, strolling or, occasionally, running along Soho's streets, darting through courts and alleyways. From late in the afternoon, it was the smartly dressed and fragrant working girls who attracted my attention.

Along with the show people, they brightened up the dinginess of austerity-bound Britain in the years immediately after the war. Resources rarely ran to snazzy paint for street doors, cheerful curtains or jaunty awnings for shops. Contrary to popular belief, wartime and post-war women's clothing could be bright and cheery – it is the black and white films and photographs of the time that have led us to believe that fashions were dreary. Londoners, however, often chose to wear more sober hues because smoke from open fires blackened not only old buildings, but also collars and cuffs. The famous pea-soupers, the stinking sulphur-yellow smogs that were so much a part of London life in the early fifties, left everything smothered in layers of soot and grey, surprisingly greasy, smudges and blobs. As soap was precious and the supply of hot water was grudging – a bath was limited to a few measly inches and couples and siblings were encouraged to share their weekly dip – it made sense to choose dark colours that didn't show the grime and thus cut down on washing. Successful prostitutes, on the other hand, could afford both black market soap and to send their clothes to dry cleaners or laundries: such extravagance was
considered a legitimate expense as being well turned out was good for business.

The bright red lips and nails of the working girls also provided more splashes of colour in the general dinginess, and their clothes added a much-needed touch of glamour. When everyone was allocated a mere forty-eight clothing coupons a year, and a coat would take sixteen, a costume twelve and then there were underwear, blouses, skirts and footwear to gobble up the rest of the measly allowance, it was no wonder that most people's garments looked distinctly frayed and tatty. ‘Make do and mend' became the order of the day. In contrast, the working girls had an everyday chic that was the street-level equivalent of the stars of Hollywood. Second-hand glamour was an effective antidote to the relentless insecurity, squalor, misery and poverty that went with the war and its aftermath – it is no wonder that so many girls had their heads turned by it.

‘Coming to London was like one possibly going over to America,' remembered Clare, who fell into prostitution as a teenager soon after the Second World War. ‘The women I was introduced to were like film stars to me.'

Prostitution and the West End have gone together since before Nell Gwyn was plucked from the streets of Covent Garden by Charles II. The heart of the vice trade drifted slowly west, along with that of the entertainment industry, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Piccadilly, the Haymarket and the streets of Soho grew in importance as streetwalkers' beats, while Fleet Street, the Strand and
Covent Garden went in to a slow decline. West End girls were seen as a cut above the poor wretches who would do anything and anyone for gin money in the mean streets of the East End. The victims of Jack the Ripper were all miserably poor, while the brothels and seraglios Up West were patronized by the aristocracy.

The First World War brought hundreds of thousands of young men to London on their way to the front line, or back for a few days' precious leave. This created an enormous rise in demand for sex workers in the capital, and particularly the West End, where so many other entertainments were on offer. The supply of willing women rose to meet the demand, creating a public scandal.

After the war, a sexual revolution swept through London. Those who had survived or avoided the trenches, and the Spanish flu pandemic that followed, flung themselves in to a world of dance crazes, jazz, booze, drugs – cocaine was a particular favourite – and scandalous behaviour. The ‘fast set' based many of their activities in West End clubs, where ‘hostesses' blurred the line between show business and prostitution. Soho and Shepherd Market became famous – or notorious, depending on your point of view – red light districts. The money to be made meant there was no shortage of recruits. Even in the Depression of the thirties, working girls could earn £15–£20 in a four-hour shift, at a time when a shopgirl was lucky to get more than £2 a week.

In the Second World War, history repeated itself. Camps in the Home Counties filled with young servicemen, most of
whom headed straight for London when at liberty, packing the West End streets with young men who were in their prime and far from home. Essentially anonymous, they were free to seek out sexual adventures they'd never find in their own communities, where they were bound by strict social mores that demanded that a wedding came before a leg-over, and there was often hell to pay if it didn't. Reliable birth control was not always readily available and the stigma of being an unmarried mother was something no ‘respectable' girl would willingly face. The tarts cajoling them from dark doorways provided many young men with their first opportunity for sexual adventuring, and the very real possibility that they might die tomorrow emboldened them to seize the chance.

The boom time for West End prostitutes really got under way when America entered the war. The vast numbers of GIs – ‘over-paid, over-sexed and over here' – who came to London were even further from home and the disapproving, prying eyes of those who knew them. Better still, as far as the vice trade was concerned, they brought with them lively libidos, large pay packets and no inhibitions about spending their money on a good time.

The extra money to be earned brought more women in to the streets, parks and nightclubs of the West End. In 1931, there were around 3,000 prostitutes in London, but by the end of the war this number had risen, at a very conservative estimate, to 6,700. This did not include what I think of as part-time or casual sex workers. Some were married to servicemen who were away in the forces, and saw prostitution as a way to
earn extra money to buy expensive luxuries like black market goods, and to pay for nights on the town. Others were single mothers desperate for money to support their children, or war widows who also had offspring to keep. Opportunistic single women, often teenagers, were sometimes prepared to go with men for a bit of excitement, money, glamour and such elusive luxuries of life as nylons, chocolates, cigarettes – things that the American troops, in particular, had in abundance. These part-timers dropped in and out of the trade; some only hit the streets at weekends, having worked as factory hands, shop assistants or land girls during the week.

One interviewee, who was just fourteen at the time, remembers it all vividly. ‘My first sexual encounter was in Green Park with one of the girls. I can't remember exactly what tree it was – it was just one or two back, because in the blackout you couldn't see very far – but it was ten shillings, which was a lot of money then. She was fair-haired and – we used to sit on the bench talking afterwards – apparently her husband was away at war, and she was a clippie. And that was a – well, I won't say it was a regular thing, but after that, if I had ten bob, I'd go down there.'

In the war (and, in fact, right up to the Street Offences Act of 1959), there were broadly two main classes of prostitute: those who worked as ‘hostesses' in clubs, and streetwalkers. There were, in turn, two types of streetwalker, those who took their clients to nearby flats and those who did the deed outside – what my mother used to call the ‘ten bob and find your own
railings' sort of girl, like the clippie mentioned by our previous punter above. Hyde Park was a popular place for the latter, although the blackout provided many more nooks and crannies for such brief assignations. Those who were organized enough to take their clients indoors found that more and better flats to rent came on the market as wealthy people left the city to escape the bombing. As a precaution, streetwalkers rarely lived in the flats where they did business, which is why the abundance of rentable property was such a bonus.

There were so many women on the streets at times that they found themselves competing, sometimes literally fighting, for space. Newcomers had either to find new pitches or to buy out someone who was retiring. The buyer would pay a proportion of her earnings for an agreed amount of time, and the seller made sure the girls who had beats nearby were no trouble.

In the main, hostesses took their clients to a hotel or, more dangerously, to their own homes. Writing about nightclub hostesses in
Madness after Midnight
, jazz musician Jack Glicco states baldly that ‘It was the girls that brought the trade. It was the girls who boosted the sales of drink. It was the girls who, when the night was done, took their chosen clients home.' During his long career as a musician in the West End's many nightclubs, he met literally thousands of such women. ‘They parade through my memory in an endless stream: tall and short, dark and fair, old and young, wicked and (reasonably) good.'

After the end of the war, the GIs left and many of the
‘casuals' gradually drifted off, clearing the way for a more organized trade. There was still money to be made, as men had got in to the habit of using prostitutes in the war, and the fall in prices immediately after the Americans left was steadied by an increasing demand for the services of women still on the game. There was so much money in vice that the authorities feared – with good reason, as it turned out – that the police would be corrupted. When the end of the blackout made the extent of prostitution more obvious, they instituted a crackdown. Arrests for prostitution rose from 1,983 in 1945 to 4,289 in 1946 and 5,363 in 1948.

This wave of arrests did not greatly affect the number of girls on the streets, who treated the inevitable fine as a business expense. In the post-war years, Owen Gardner worked in Page's on Shaftesbury Avenue. The company's offices looked out on Romilly Street. ‘We had big long windows at the time, and you could look out and see two or three of them walking up and down there – and you could see the police pick them up, too.

‘The girls seem to regard it as “Oh well, Thursday's my day to be collected,” sort of thing, and go to court. In those days, in the
Evening Standard
– or maybe the
News
– they used to have Courts Day by Day, and they would get fined thirty shillings or so. This was her 105th conviction, that kind of nonsense. It was just, like, in their costs, a sort of tax.' Owen was not exaggerating. Lots of the girls could have taken out a season ticket at Marlborough Street court, racking up literally hundreds of convictions.

Some of the girls were independent, while others would turn over their earnings to pimps and ponces. The difference between ponces and pimps is that a pimp has a ‘stable' of girls, and actively promotes them, while a ponce lives off the earnings of one or two women with whom he has some kind of relationship. Sometimes the line between being a ponce and a lover was blurred. Leo Zanelli remembers a working girl called Rita, who lived across the road from him in Romilly Street. ‘She was living with a black guy there, who was a very nice chap. You used to see him in the street, and she was always hanging out the window.

‘You know, a lot is made of pimps, and there are, if you like, pimps who have groups of girls and that sort of thing, but your average prostitute was basically working on her own. She's hardly going to strike a meaningful relationship with someone working in an office somewhere. It's got to be one of the lads from the streets or round about, and they really were girlfriend and boyfriend, that sort of relationship. Sometimes they would have a row and just split up. I can't really remember anybody being terrified or saying, “If I walk away, he's going to come round and beat me up,” although I have no doubt it happened.'

Leo was right. There were vicious, violent pimps in the West End. In
Madness after Midnight
, Jack Glicco makes it clear that he knew many a nightclub hostess with loose knicker elastic and a greedy ponce in the background. He writes about Therese, who ‘genuinely hated the game' and ‘confessed to me that she was going to chuck it. She was
going to go respectable.' Therese planned to break the news to her ponce the very night she confessed her longing for a normal life, but, knowing the man in question had a reputation for vicious and ruthless behaviour, Glicco warned her to be careful. She simply nodded and smiled.

‘I can see her yet,' Glicco writes, ‘her eyes glowing with pride in herself at taking the decision; her soft skin clear and lovely.' Six months after this conversation, Glicco saw her again. ‘She was soliciting at the corner of Bond Street and Piccadilly. Her face was partly in shadow, and when I went up to her and spoke I saw why. Down that once-lovely face ran a long and still livid scar. She did not tell me how she got it, and I did not ask. I could guess.'

In the mid twentieth century, the premier pimps in London were the Messina brothers. Usually described as Maltese, they were the sons of a Sicilian, Giuseppe Messina, who set himself up as a brothel-keeper, first in Malta – where a large concentration of British troops provided plenty of custom – and then in Egypt. His five sons all went in to the family business. In 1934, Eugenio – known as Gino – came to England, and his brothers Carmelo, Alfredo, Salvatore and Attilio soon followed. Before long, they were dominating the West End's vice trade, building an empire that lasted well into the fifties. They made several thousand pounds a week from their girls, whom they paid £50 a week.