Up West (42 page)

Charlie Blyghton was essentially a local businessman, serving the local community. ‘His customers were all sorts – regulars, locals, people who came to work who wanted their sixpence or shilling on. He wouldn't go up to them, they would come to him. It was all word of mouth.' Other people, especially people with jobs that brought them in to contact with the general public, would join in for a small fee. Henry, the Swiss Italian on the door at La Isola Bella, where Janet's mother worked, used to take bets for her dad.

Like the majority of street bookies, Charlie Blyghton had a legitimate status, too. ‘He had a legal pitch at the dogs and the races. He went to White City and Harringay for the dog-racing, and he had someone go to Catford on a Saturday. For horse racing he went to Alexandra Park and Sandown, any place you could get to by train at Victoria. He went under the name of Jackie Pye.'

Charlie Blyghton's double life as a legitimate and illegitimate bookie – not to mention running an illegal gambling club in the basement of the house where they had a flat – was far from one of luxury and ease. ‘He would be out on the street in the mornings about ten or eleven until the first race, whenever that started,' Janet recalls, ‘and again from about five to six in the evenings for the dogs and the night racing in the summer. And of course if there was dog-racing in London he would be off to his pitch at White City
or wherever, and then back to the spieler until the early hours. He was a hard worker, he kept going.'

He had two full-time employees, who worked as runners and lookouts as well as helping him on his legal outings at the dog tracks and racecourse. They were a father and son team. ‘Matt Jones, who was in his eighties, and Charlie lived in Red Lion Square,' Janet remembers. ‘Matt used to go around on a bike, but his son could run a bit faster. They would use Alfie Binks's shop [a greengrocer's in Frith Street] to hide in if they had to get away. He had a basement, and they would go down there to get away.'

Bookies' runners apparently got their name because they would ‘run errands' for the bookmaker, visiting clients to collect bets and that sort of thing, rather than for their ability to have it away on their toes at the sight of a policeman bearing down on them. Not that it did any harm to be able to show a clean pair of heels to the coppers. My late friend, Terry Pizzey, used to tell me stories of his childhood in Marylebone between the wars, when he knew a bookie's runner who had been christened Florence, but whose fleetness of foot when confronted with the law led to her being nicknamed ‘Scarper Flo'.

Another example of this vanished breed was one of the more wonderfully eccentric characters in my own young life, a man called Fred Potter, who spoke entirely in slang. He was a very good friend of my father, and at one point combined being a bookie's runner with a job as a beat copper in South London. Unfortunately, the constabulary took a dim view,
and gave him the elbow, which prompted Fred to become a full-time member of my father's netherworld of pornographic bookshops and illegal gambling.

Bookies and their runners were a fairly common sight on the streets in the fifties. Often, as with the working girls, the police would turn a blind eye to their activities, provided they weren't too blatant about it, although there were exceptions. Olga and Graham Jackson's father was a policeman who was nicknamed ‘Snakey', as in ‘snake in the grass'. One reason he got his name was that, unlike ex-Constable Potter, he particularly disliked brasses (prostitutes) and bookies, and made it his business to arrest as many of them as possible on his beat in Covent Garden.

Occasionally there were general clean-ups, or some enthusiastic new recruit got carried away by the sport of it, and Charlie Blyghton would get lifted. ‘Once,' Janet remembers, ‘during the summer holidays, myself and Liz, a mate that lived in Greek Street, saw Dad being led off by two men. I went up to him and said “Can I have money for ice cream?” and he said “No, go away”, but gave me this sort of look that I should follow him. He always wore this gaberdine mac. As the plainclothes coppers led him along to West End Central, he was screwing up the bets and dropping them through a hole in his pocket. By the time they got to Meard Street, he had dropped all the bets he had, and me and my mate, following on behind, picked them all up and took them home. By the time he got to the police station, he had nothing, so they couldn't nick him for anything.' And I
expect he managed to get the bets laid and the punters paid out as a result of the girls' timely help as well; I hope they got their ice cream for their efforts.

‘Another time,' Janet went on, ‘a copper spotted him, and he dodged in to the French baker's in Greek Street, where they baked bread on the premises, and flew upstairs. The copper didn't know if he'd gone up or down, so he stood in the door, to make sure he couldn't slip out. Dad had gone upstairs, and dumped a bag of flour out of the first floor window on to the copper. While he was dusting himself off, my dad was down the stairs, out the door and away.'

Every now and then the coppers won one. ‘He got pinched a few times and landed up in Great Marlborough Street magistrates' court. He'd go up there and be fined, and then he would go back and do it again. They'd fine him a few quid and then he'd go back and earn it. He used to ask for time to pay.'

Several other bookies operated in Covent Garden and Soho. ‘There was another Charlie for a start,' says Janet. ‘Charlie Fordham used to have pitches in Gerrard Street, Newport Street, down that end. There were probably others, all with their pitches. You could always get a bet on.'

When I was very young, I remember a line of rather drunken looking telephone boxes – the Blitz had shaken them up a bit – outside a post office which was either in, or near, Marshall Street. It was a place where bookies and runners who operated without the luxury of a private phone would hang about, gossiping and jiggling their pennies, waiting to
call in bets or to get results. Father and I would go there if he wanted to place a bet in a hurry, or to track down his mate Fred. Soho Square was another place to put a few bob on; Prince Monolulu, tipster, street bookie and child-minder
extraordinaire
could usually be found there.

Jeff Sloneem remembers a bookie who spent less time in the streets: ‘I had a friend who lived in Wardour Street. His mother was a good friend of my mother, and his father was a bookie. He didn't work on the streets, but he had a bookie's office in his flat. This was obviously completely illegal, although I didn't know that at the time. I used to go there a lot because they had a television and we didn't.'

The street – and flat! – betting scene changed dramatically after the passage of the Betting and Gaming Act in 1960. This made it legal to run gambling premises – from bingo halls to Mayfair mini-casinos – as private member clubs, and for bookmakers to accept off-course bets in licensed premises, which soon came to be known as betting shops. Casinos were so restricted by the 1960 Act that it was only when this was reformed in 1968 that they really took off, but a rash of betting shops opened on high streets everywhere. Bookies went from being shady characters who operated largely outside the law, to slightly less shady characters, who operated not only within the law, but also indoors in the warm.

Charles Hasler, who policed the Soho Streets in the fifties, did not think the new law was an improvement. ‘Street bookmaking was less harmful than betting shops, because
the punters had to put all their bets for the day at the same time. They couldn't, if they had a win, put it all back again, because the runners used to disappear off the street to get their slips and money to the boss man before racing started. All sorts of people picked up these slips and took them in – milkmen, for instance. I never thought street bookies did any harm, although sometimes there was trouble if someone interfered with someone else's pitch.'

Of course, the majority of the new licensed betting shops were opened by people with experience in the field, as it were. ‘People were often running credit bookmaking elsewhere as well as their ready money betting, and all that happened with betting shops was it legitimized their business,' Charles Hasler points out. The course and street bookies alike took some of the outdoor ambience in to the shops, which were often little more than basic dives, very rough and ready. One of those early punters described one to me, but asked for his name not to be used. ‘There were no TVs, of course, often nowhere to sit,' he remembers. ‘The runners and form were torn out of one of the morning newspapers and stuck on the wall with drawing pins, there were cheap pens and paper to write in your selection, and a counter to pass your cash over. Behind the counter there was someone scribbling the odds for the next two or three races on a big blackboard. That was it for décor. The windows were painted over, fluorescent lights. Blokes hanging around smoking and looking fed up, occasionally getting excited as the Extel feed from the courses described a race rather than the prices. You hardly
ever saw a woman in there. It was all blokes, always full of smoke and stinking a bit of beer sweat.'

Mike O'Rouke left school in 1962 to start work chalking the boards in a betting shop belonging to his uncle, James Keith. ‘He had about four or five shops in the West End, and I went to work for him in Great Newport Street. There was another shop in New Row, one up in Drury Lane, which is now a hotel, on the corner of Shorts Gardens, and another one down in Exeter Street. My uncle started out as a runner. That's where most of them started. All the big firms started out in the streets.'

Not all of the former street bookies prospered, however. ‘When the Act came in,' Janet Vance remembers, ‘my dad went legit with two shops. One was in Old Pye Street, Victoria, and one in Kilburn High Street. He went broke. From there, he went in to the film business, in Soho Square. He'd got to know people from the BBC, customers. He used to do voice-overs. He had a rough and ready London voice – he'd curse and swear at you without even blinking.' Mine too! I always said Father was bilingual, fluent in English and Anglo-Saxon. His accent was middle class, as he had been an actor briefly in his youth, but he retained his command of the colourful language associated with a London street urchin, which is how he started out in life.

Although there were street bookies in every town and city, gambling clubs were generally thin on the ground, except in Soho. This was mainly because many of the nationalities
that made their homes in the West End – the Maltese and the Chinese, for example – had very different views about gambling than the British legislature. Spielers were often frequented by crooks, who had an easy come, easy go attitude to their cash. Some were definitely dens of iniquity – but not all of them, as Leo Zanelli recalls: ‘When my father retired from running the restaurant, he opened the Tosca in Newport Place, just over the road from where we lived. It was an old-fashioned Italian drinking club, mainly for men, with cards, drink and betting on horses.'

Janet Vance also remembers how her mother ‘used to work for Joe Cohen at his club in Greek Street. That was a drinking and gambling club. The gambling went on behind curtains; it was a legal drinking club and an illegal gambling club.' This was a common arrangement, but Janet's father's club, in the basement of the building where they lived, had no pretence to legality. In fact, it had very few pretensions of any kind. ‘The club was just a basement room, quite small. You could get tea, coffee, and you could have a drink – but under the counter, sort of thing – and play cards. Dad didn't take a cut, you just paid to play and for your drinks. It was open of a night until quite late in the morning. He was on the streets during the day, then did his bits down there. He worked hard for his money.'

Charles Hasler recalls that ‘Down the end of Old Compton Street toward Charing Cross Road, there was a court that had a gaming club in it which used to get raided quite regularly. The owners didn't take any notice, it was no more than rent
to them. They paid the fine and carried on. Once, at West End Central police station, we shoved them all in an accommodation cell while we were trying to decide what to do with them. While they were in there, they continued their dice game in the cell. Some people who had several quid on them when we booked them in had nothing when they went out. They were incorrigible.'

You could always find a card game – pontoon, brag and solo as well as poker – in Soho, if you knew the right people, whether it was at unlicensed clubs like the one Charlie Blyghton ran, or at even less formal venues. You didn't really need much to run a card game, after all; just a room, tables and chairs. Owen Gardner, who worked next door to the Empire Snooker Hall, remembers that ‘There was a blanked-off section in there where they used to play cards. In the heyday of the 2I's, there was a whole string of rock and rollers playing cards in there, all afternoon, gambling behind that screen.'

I remember card games going on late in to the night at our kitchen table. One morning I woke up to a shower of big, white fivers being dumped on me, and the instruction to ‘Count them, it'll teach you to count in fives.' Father had, apparently, found a high-stakes poker game and had done well. We were in the clover, for a little while at least.

Cards and horses weren't the only things you could bet on. There was always some action to be found in the snooker halls. ‘My father was a very good snooker player pre-war, when Joe Davis was world champion,' Owen Gardner recalls.
‘Joe used to tour the country to play the best snooker players in each area, and my father scored most against him, or came closest to beating him, and as a result won a cue. He used to go to a Cypriot barber, just at the back of Seven Dials, and they would say “Oh, you should go to the Empire if you're that good, make some money.” But my father steered clear of it: if people are gambling on you, it's like boxing or anything else, you win when you have to win, and you lose when they tell you to lose. He stayed right out of it.'