Christopher Howse - Soho in the Eighties

SOHO IN THE EIGHTIES

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In 1987 Daniel Farson threw a party to celebrate the publication of his book Soho in the Fifties. It was held upstairs in Kettners, which had opened up French restaurant food to London diners in the 1860s. By 1987 it was pleasantly faded. The man who had built the house that became Kettners was in the 1730s the first known landlord of the Coach and Horses public house opposite.

At Daniels party the usual suspects turned out, from Francis Bacon to young Fred Ingrams, the son of the editor of Private Eye, for they liked him although he was, as he knew, a monster, a Jekyll regularly turned Hyde by the application of sufficient gin.

His book came out 30 years after the period it celebrated, and now it is 30 years since the eighties. Soho in the Eighties is a memoir. Like a policeman giving evidence, my memory is refreshed by contemporaneous notes. My focus is the places where poets, painters, stagehands, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts met to drink and converse, or shout at each other.

There is nothing much here about the hospitals of Soho, interesting though they were, or the Marquee, Madame Jojos or even Ronnie Scotts. Many little worlds throve in Soho and this is mine. It had remarkable inhabitants.

That world has gone. Everyone is dead among the older people, apart from Norman Balon, Londons rudest landlord; too many of the younger people are dead, too.

The crowded stages where the nightly tragicomedy was played out were principally the Coach and Horses, the French pub and the Colony Room Club. They had their virtues, and their dangers. It was all very funny indeed, and of course ended in disaster.

London, 26 July 2018

Dont mess with those Bernard brothers, said the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses. But I did, with all three, and much else in Soho, with what effect you may judge.

Without knowing it, I had jumped in at the deep end. The Coach and Horses in Greek Street the Coach as everyone called it did have a shallow end and a deep end, although there were no warning signs.

And so it was that, a couple of years later, I was caught up in the Great Coach and Horses Betting Raid, when the Metropolitan Police swooped on Jeffrey Bernard for making an illegal book on horseracing. The funniest part was when Sandy Fawkes tried to save the bookies bank by sweeping the money from the bar counter into her handbag.

But, wait a moment if you dont know any of these people, it wont mean anything. The cast was what made the daily performances of the Soho tragicomedy so compelling. Ive never laughed as much as I did in that decade. Any television sitcom seemed utterly lame in comparison, even though the long-running comedy of Soho ended in divorce, sickness, poverty and death.

Jeffrey Bernard obviously took the lead role at first. I spent more days in his company than Boswell did with Samuel Johnson. But Jeffrey was his own Boswell, recounting a version of his life week by week in his Low Life column in the Spectator. I used to bring him a copy at Thursday lunchtime when I worked for the magazine. Hed have already been in the pub a couple of hours, since opening time at 11 a.m. By the eighties, his dedication to drink was having an effect.

A bare line sometimes appeared in the Spectator in place of his column: Jeffrey Bernard is unwell (which was to give the title to Keith Waterhouses play about him), and some readers thought that it meant he had been too drunk to write. It didnt. It meant that diabetes, pancreatitis and gradually worse afflictions had interrupted his routine. As Michael Heath the cartoonist perceptively remarked, Jeffreys hobby was to observe his own physical dissolution.

He usually came into the pub by the door from Greek Street at the far end, the shallow end, where the Italians and shoplifters drank. Sometimes hed take a paper napkin from a bunch in a glass on the counter put out folded by the landlord Normans mother, ready for the lunch trade, and blow his nose, which dripped with the exertion in the fresh air of getting to the pub.

His hand shook. It was, he remembered having been told by a medic, a benign tremor. His muscles were also beginning to waste. And this was a man whod fancied himself a boxer and had once got a licence. Im as weak as a kitten, hed say, as he climbed onto the high stool at the bar. By the end of the decade, when he was in his late fifties, his knees were thicker than his thighs. On the seat of the chair at his desk in his lodgings was a ring air cushion.

Part of Jeffreys devotion to being a bohemian a layabout, hed call it sometimes was having no fixed abode. For a few years hed been a lodger in the Great Portland Street flat belonging to Geraldine Norman, the widow of Frank Norman. Frank Norman was best known for writing the musical Fings Aint Wot They Used TBe for Joan Littlewoods Theatre Workshop at Stratford East. Enlivened by Lionel Barts songs, the play was a hit in 1959 and transferred to the West End, running for 886 performances.

Frank Norman also wrote a fictionalized memoir of Soho in the fifties, Stand On Me, which explored the lowest of low life. She hadnt been around all that long, but she was already a gaffless slag doing skippers in the karzay, one line read. (Skippers in the karzay or khazi as the more usual form has it means kipping at night in a public lavatory, an alternative to going case: going home with a man or woman as much for a bed for the night as anything else.)

Frank Norman was taller than Jeffrey, and the most striking thing about his appearance was a great scar down one side of his face, a chiv mark hed have called it.

Jeffrey and he had together produced a book called Soho Night and Day (1966). Its a good book, but Jeffreys photographs are more remarkable than Frank Normans text. Theres one captioned Retired chorus girl of an old woman, in a wide-brimmed hat with a rosette, drinking from a cocktail glass in the French pub. Another shows a butcher standing in Hammetts ornately tiled shop in Rupert Street slicing with a cleaver down through the carcase of a pig suspended by hooks in its rear hocks, all the way from the tail to the ear. Jeffrey must have had in mind John Deakins photograph from 1952 of Francis Bacon, stripped to the waist, holding two halves of a carcase hanging vertically from hooks, with the inside, the ribs, on show, facing the viewer.

Anyway, Frank and Geraldine Norman had married in 1970, and he died in 1980. Jeffrey moved in as a lodger the next year. He sat at the desk that had been Franks and between his typewriter and the window stood a bust of Nelson. About twenty years ago, Jeffrey told Ena Kendall of the Sunday Times Magazine, Frank and I were walking through Hampstead and we saw that bust in an antique shop window. It was 5. Frank had some money on him and I had only five bob, so he got it and I was angry with him for years about it. I just think: what an awful way to get it, by him dying.

I envisaged giving him a comfortable room which he could pay for or not, according to his means, Geraldine remembered of Jeffreys arrival, and I imagined myself cooking him nourishing meals to cushion the antagonism between alcohol and diabetes. Like many people in the early eighties, she thought he was dying, but five years later he was still going, sleeping at Great Portland Street, waking early and drinking tea and squeezed orange juice and vodka before making his way to the Coach for opening time.