Tommy Steele - Bermondsey Boy: Memories of a Forgotten World

PENGUIN BOOKS

BERMONDSEY BOY

After a short spell in the merchant navy, Tommy Steele rose to fame in 1956 as Britain's first home-grown rock 'n' roll star. He went on to have a long career in stage and film musicals, starring in Half A Sixpence, Hans Andersen, Singin' in the Rain and Finian's Rainbow to name but a few, and most recently in Scrooge at the London Palladium. He lives in South London.

Memories of a Forgotten World

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published by Michael Joseph 2006

Published in Penguin Books 2007

Copyright Tommy Steele, 2006

All rights reserved

The Acknowledgements on constitute an extension of this copyright page.

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

ISBN: 978-0-141-90301-9

for Darbo

After I had celebrated the fiftieth year of rock and roll at the Royal Variety Performance, I was quizzed at the press conference on my beginnings in showbusiness.

According to theatrical record, I gave my first public performance at the Empire Theatre, Sunderland, in the winter of 1956. On the other hand, the History of Rock has my dbut during the summer of that year, in the basement of the Two I's coffee bar, Soho, London. Yet again there is a fleet of merchant seamen who would swear on a gallon of grog that it took place on the after deck of the Queen of Bermuda in the spring of 1954. All wrong, I'm afraid. The truth is I played my first part on a steam train heading for Goodwood in 1946. My stage was a clattering corridor, my audience an elderly ticket collector with a Hitler moustache and suspicious eyes. At that moment I felt the thrill of the theatre for the first time. It never left me.

Tommy Steele

London Palladium

2006

The summer of 1946 was a full year after the end of the Second World War, and for me as a nine-year-old nothing much had changed in London. Rationing was the constant excuse for just about everything and, in spite of the Luftwaffe's best efforts, school was still open. I lived by the docks in Bermondsey, a place that even in August stayed grey and solemn. It lies to the south-east of London, built close to the Thames, and nowadays it boasts modern houses, flats and high-tech workshops, a transformation that has equalled the magic of a fairy godmother.

In medieval times this vast area, combined with Southwark, was the domain of the bishops of Winchester. They ruled it like a private kingdom, but it was not a realm of pride or honour but a pisse pot neath the arse of the City. In other words, if the great City didn't want something, it got chucked over the Thames into the stews of Southwark. Bear-baiters, cock-fighters, brothel-keepers and actors, all dragged themselves before the bishops and paid the going rate to set up shop in safety. Through centuries of bad press Bermondsey has gazed over the Thames like an innocent bystander, watching alleged traitors enter the gates of the Tower, seeing the smoke and flames of the Great Fire, then the rise of a brave new city.

Somehow even now, as you look across at Wren's immaculate spires and the work of New Age architects, you may wonder whether Bermondsey was forgotten during the shaping of things. Apart from the welcome modernization of the docks, the place is still pretty well stuck in the nineteenth century. It was a busy borough, this Bermondsey, and a happy place, the place of my birth and my father's before me.

*

Thomas Walter Hicks, also known as Darbo, was born in 1901. The family lived in Pits Head, a cul-de-sac off the notorious Pages Walk, an alley close to the Old Kent Road. Pits Head was always dark, its early-Georgian two-storeyed terraced houses had moved so close, with the soft ground, that the upper-floor windows almost touched those on the other side of the cobbled street. A stable at the end of the dwellings held the two magnificent horses that pulled my grandfather around the area, delivering coal. The house next to the stable's dung-heap was the family home, two rooms on each floor plus an outside lavatory. My grandparents and their fifteen kids slept in three rooms; the fourth, the scullery, was used for cooking, eating, washing and congregating.

In Victorian times Pages Walk was the equivalent of one of today's no-go areas: strangers, borough officials and police were not welcome there. On the rare occasions when a couple of coppers (they always walked in pairs) ventured into The Walk' they were grabbed, stripped and allowed to leave, suitably reminded not to come back. It was rough and tough and it was my grandmother Martha's pitch. She was a bookie's runner. In those times, off-course betting on dogs and horses was against the law. The only way a punter could get a bet on was either to go to the races or to seek out the illegal runner. It was a simple ritual: write your selection on a slip of paper, wrap up your stake money in it, go down Pages Walk and put the package into Martha's hand. Then at two p.m., before the racing started, she would take her handbag full of wagers and give it to the bookmaker in the Prince Tec pub. For this she received a bit of silver and, according to Darbo, spent the lot on snuff and Guinness.

Darbo didn't like his mother, but his young sister Mary was the light of his life. When he was eleven he protected her, fed her and clothed her. It was a well-known joke in The Walk that when the Jewish traders in the nearby market yelled, Gonif, gonif! Mary Hicks was about to get a new dress. Anything that Darbo could do for her, he did.

On one occasion just before the First World War, officialdom got through to The Walk. Martha was ordered to send all her children below the age of thirteen to school by law. She told Darbo and Mary, grudgingly, to turn up at Webb Street School. So's I don't get no bleedin' trouble, Martha told them, caring less about the education of her kids than about her position in the neighbourhood.

The sudden shock of being in a school was nothing like the embarrassment Darbo and Mary suffered on their first day: the whole place laughed at them because they had no shoes. It was nothing unusual for the Hicks kids to be barefoot, but to anybody else, especially children, it was a funny sight. Darbo and his sister were taunted and tormented but only on that first day. Darbo wouldn't let it happen again. The next morning he crept into the Bermondsey market-place. The traders were gathered round their barrows, sorting their wares for the deals of the day. He crawled under the wheels and slowly made his way to the shoe stall. There he sat, listening to the traders talking in Yiddish, waiting for his chance to lift two pairs without discovery. Eventually the voices faded down the road. Darbo rose from the depths and grabbed what he wanted, but before the leather had cleared the pile, the cry came,