Up West (37 page)

The girls controlled by the Messinas were put to work from four o'clock on weekday afternoons to as late – or early – as six in the morning. The brothers, or their henchmen, checked to
make sure that they were on their beat and working the hours dictated by Gino, who appears to have been the dominant brother. They ran their girls from a bewildering number of addresses throughout the West End, and kept them on the move. They took these flats in a variety of false names, and retained the services of a solicitor to pay the rates, so neither their real names nor their favourite aliases ever appeared on official documents.

To maximize their profits, the brothers introduced the ‘short-time' or ‘ten-minute rule'. This meant that a client had to be in and out, as it were, in ten minutes or less. If they strayed over this time limit, then someone, usually the prostitute's ‘maid', would bang on the door to remind them to get their trousers on or to cough up more money for extra time.

The rule was unpopular with punters, and its enforcement sometimes led to violence, but it soon became the norm. Quentin Crisp, in
The Naked Civil Servant
, recounts how, when he was working in Wardour Street in the fifties, he and his colleagues would watch the girls leaning against the wall across the way from the office window. ‘We measured the amount of time they were out of sight with the men they had picked up. Including getting into her flat and returning from it to the street, one woman was sometimes away for only seven minutes.'

The rule meant each girl could turn over many more punters in a working night. They could service as many as five or six men an hour, at as much as £5 a time. Girls regularly made
£100 a night, a truly enormous sum when you consider that the average weekly wage was £8. Marthe Watts, who wrote of her life as a Messina girl in her memoir,
The Men in My Life
, reported servicing forty-nine men in a fourteen-hour shift on VE night: she was going for a round fifty, but she either ran out of time or stamina.

As well as making economic sense, the rule also meant that the girls had no chance to get to know their clients, or to socialize with the locals. This suited the Messinas, as isolated girls were more vulnerable and easier to control. Nearly all their girls were recruited from overseas. Even before the brothers' reign was established, the young women walking the dim, sooty streets of Soho came to be known collectively as ‘Fifis', as so many of them came from France.

The British had long been of the opinion that the French were an unusually sexy and uninhibited race, with little, if any, of the tortured hypocrisy that we have historically displayed towards our ‘baser' instincts. In the forties and fifties, a French girl was considered the epitome of sexual adventurousness, thanks in part to the pornographic films, books and pictures smuggled in from ‘the Continent' by men like my father. The French ‘sex kitten' (why a kitten should be considered sexy, only the lords of the tabloids and fifties boys of all ages knew) Brigitte Bardot's pout and figure featured large in many an Englishman's fantasies and because she was out of their reach, her compatriots on Old Compton Street had to substitute.

Later, pornography flooded in from Scandinavia, and
Swedish girls took up the rather dubious mantle of fantasy nation – hence the cards festooning street doors and newsagents' windows advertising the services of French and Swedish models. Of course, not all of the women were foreign. Some hailed from no further away than Wapping, Slough or Pease Pottage, but they knew that a little creative advertising could be very good for business.

There was another advantage for the Messinas in employing foreign girls. As they often had a rudimentary grasp of English, the pimps could keep them isolated from everyone except each other. Those who joined the Messina family had their activities closely supervised by their maids, and by the brothers themselves. They encouraged their girls to spy on one another and to report any misdemeanours. Transgressions were punished with violence. Gino Messina favoured using an electric flex, ripped from a standard lamp, to beat his women in to submission.

Because foreign nationals involved in prostitution could be deported, the Messina brothers developed a lively side trade in providing the girls with English husbands. Duncan Webb, a campaigning journalist on the
People
newspaper, made it his mission to bring down the Messina brothers. He was particularly scandalized by the way they traded in national allegiances: ‘By bribery and corruption they organised marriages of convenience both in Britain and abroad to enable their harlots to assume British nationality.'

They were not alone in doing that, although they were probably the first to set up an organized trade. For a fee, a
broker would arrange a marriage between an Englishman in need of money and a continental – usually, but by no means always, French – woman to provide her with British nationality and a British passport. Once the ceremony was over, man and wife usually didn't need to meet again. Marthe Hucbourg, a young Frenchwoman, and Arthur Watts, a semi-derelict drunk, went through just such an arranged marriage in November 1937. They met briefly before they were married, and afterwards only once, when a magistrate demanded reassurance that Marthe was entitled to live in England, Gino Messina managed to prise Arthur loose from his bar stool long enough for him to appear in court to vouch for his own existence, and assure the magistrate that Marthe was indeed a citizen and thus could not be deported. Marthe never saw her husband again.

Once a young recruit had been married off, she would be brought to London and set up to work in a flat – usually, but not exclusively, in Soho or Mayfair – along with a maid. Maids performed several vital functions. They were literally maids in that they kept the place of business clean and tidy, and shopped and cooked for any girls working from that address. Other duties went beyond the usual job description for domestic service. They had to keep a weather eye on the customers, make sure that business was conducted in an orderly fashion and call for help from the pimp or even the police if things became disorderly.

After the Street Offences Act drove the girls off the streets, the maids took care of the waiting punters, collecting the
money, and so on, but the practice of having maids came in to being long before the Act, and there are maids shopping in Berwick Street for their ladies to this day.

Once the Messina brothers had been brought down – largely because of their exposure by the efforts of the indefatigable Duncan Webb – a Maltese-born East End gangster, Frank Mifsud, became the dominant figure in the vice trade. Mifsud and his partner, Bernie Silver, had a new angle. They also owned many of the flats rented out to prostitutes, and ran drinkers and spielers, but ‘Big Frank' took in even more money by telling pimps and ponces that if they drank or gambled anywhere other than in his establishments, their girls would lose their flats.

Men who lived off immoral earnings were despised, and often victimized by ‘honest villains' and other criminals. Thugs like Tommy Smithson would ‘shake down' these men for easy money, knowing they would not go to the police. There was a racial overtone to some of this violence. Many pimps and ponces were overseas nationals – in the fifties, a quarter of the men charged with living off immoral earnings in London were Maltese.
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It's hard for people today to realize just how many girls there were on the streets in the fifties. They were a tourist attraction in themselves, and not just for prospective clients. Paul C., who lived in Crawley, remembers taking the train to London after school with friends to soak up the sights, sounds and smells of Soho: ‘It was twilight time. Winter late afternoons. Not nights. The girls being on the street was a revelation to me, really, because there were so many of them. Whatever direction you went, they were there, and it just seemed to be very busy from that point of view, but also busy from the point of view of life going on, different nationalities working and enjoying themselves.

‘We had great fun observing the way the girls proceeded, which was to sort of talk guys in off the street, and then we would see them, even follow them in our imaginations going up the stairs to the room, and we'd see the light go on, and we would think, from a young male's point of view, oh yes, someone else has scored here!

‘The girls seemed extraordinarily attractive and well made up, and had very attractive, very sexy clothes. They handled themselves almost like a dance routine. They'd come up, sashay up to someone, move over to the side, go round them. They could tell immediately if people were interested or not, and they seemed to gravitate back if someone was umm-ing and aah-ing, for instance. It wasn't just a case of standing there waiting for guys to come up to them, they seemed to be more pro-active – to coin a phrase.
It was almost as though they were sweeping. Figuratively speaking.

‘They seemed to be very practised in everything they did, obviously. They seemed to be very efficient. And what was intriguing, and sexual, and mysterious to us was that it seemed matter-of-fact to them, a job, and that was one of the most remarkable things about it. You have a job selling your body. This is amazing to a fourteen-year-old. It was X-rated.

‘Once or twice, I remember getting in to conversations with the girls, who were very good-humoured about it. They tolerated me and my friends, and answered our questions, more or less. How much business do you do in a day? All that sort of thing.

‘If you asked them if they'd do business, they'd say, no, not you love. [laughs] Come back in ten years. And of course we didn't have any crisp notes, those great big notes they were interested in.'

Ann Lee, who lived in Covent Garden, was told ‘we mustn't go to Soho. Good girls didn't go to Soho, that's where only the prostitutes were', but she found the entertainment in the street scene irresistible. ‘We used to walk down Soho, we used to love it, we used to watch the girls plying their trade. We thought it was brilliant. We wouldn't have done it, we'd have been too scared, but to actually watch them, it was like “Oh my Gawd, look.” And it was literally every other doorway.'

On Sunday afternoons after the war, Old Compton Street was thick with the girls, their poodles and their prospective
punters. They discussed terms as the local people passed by on their way to or from church, or simply strolled in the sunshine on their precious day off. Jeff Sloneem, who lived at the Wardour Street end of Old Compton Street until 1953, remembers that ‘I asked my mother, “Who are those women?” and she said, “Oh, they're looking for their husbands.” But they used to take over Old Compton Street on a Sunday; on a Sunday afternoon the road was full of these women – and men.'

It was the sheer visibility of prostitution that prompted the Street Offences Act of 1959, which made it illegal for the first time to ‘solicit for the purposes of prostitution'. This meant that the girls could be charged simply for being on the street; prior to this, money had to have changed hands, or a deal had to have been struck, before the woman could be arrested. The Act also reinstated prison sentences.

It did not attempt to end prostitution, just make it less visible – something that was no great problem for Sohoites, who were, in the main, a broad-minded, tolerant bunch. It achieved that, but it also made prostitutes far more vulnerable to acts of violence from punters. In the past, someone would have noticed if a girl was not back on her beat in a reasonable time, but shutting the girls away in flats meant that this simple protection was removed. Having a maid, or having more than one girl working from the same address, provided a measure of security, but making the penalties for running a disorderly house much more severe effectively stripped the working girl of even that safeguard.

Despite the risks, the girls' response to the new Act was to retreat to flats and advertise for clients, although this was not possible for them all, as Chas McDevitt recalls. ‘My dad ran the coffee bar for me when I wasn't there. He used to be there all night, until five in the morning. He used to talk about these two girls who'd come in in the last throes for coffees. They would help him clean the place out, sweep it up and everything. They actually worked Hyde Park. One of them came from Cardiff. She was married, and came up from Cardiff on the train, worked late evenings and went back first thing in the morning.

‘They were moaning because they were being forced out of the park in to premises, and they said the cheapest place they could get was seventy-five quid a week, and she was only earning ten shillings a trick in the park, so, you know, although her prices would go up if she had a house, she couldn't see the logic of it.'

Because they could not parade their wares in the street, the girls had to find other media. Some windows were full of cards advertising their services. ‘That thing about “large chests”,' remembers Ronnie Mann, ‘That's what people used to put in the newsagents' windows, and I used to think, Why have these women got so many large chests to sell? Why are they offering French polishing?'

Others simply put a sign on the street door leading to their flat. ‘I always remember we used to see the doors with “Model” advertised outside,' said Graham Jackson. ‘“Ring bell and walk up.” We would dare each other to ring the bell.
One day, a big Greek-looking guy came down the stairs and chased us; we ran all the way home. It was just a thing to do, you know. We just hung around, did things. We never thought we was in any danger.'

Some girls continued to chance their arm on the streets, and take clients in to alleys or other out-of-the-way places, as Graham Jackson recalls: ‘In Sandringham Buildings, in the Charing Cross Road, they used to have wash houses, and all the prostitutes used to use the wash houses, and we'd be like, “Look at what I found,” and they would be condoms. Of course, we didn't know what it was all about, but they'd use all that, all round there, the prostitutes, all round them back streets.'