by Victor Gregg
The young men may well have had the filthiest of occupations throughout the working week but, come Friday night, preparations started for the Saturday night dance. Sisters or mothers were cajoled into putting a knife-edge crease in the trousers, the latest fancy tie was smoothed and ironed, out came the shiny cufflinks, the patent leather pointed shoes were buffed up and the soles of the shoes rubbed down with fine glass paper so that the dancer could exhibit his dexterity and slide over the highly polished dance floors. Before entering the hall the lads gathered together to chat about the better points of the girls they hoped to dazzle and what their techniques were going to be. The girls were already in position watching the boys as they came in and had been practising the latest steps all week with the aid of the gramophones in their bedrooms. The girls had it all worked out: they knew which of the opposite sex could carry them around the floor without mishap, the clumsy ones who couldn’t dance a step, the ones they fancied and the ones they wouldn’t be seen dead with. Then there was the band itself. It was fashionable for the band to be dressed in the same style. All their jackets were the same colour as were the bow ties, the trousers immaculately creased and the hair plastered down with the latest scented grease. If there was ever a cult figure it had to be the leader of the local dance band; he was the real star of the evening and that was what our mate Joe Brown wanted to be.
We had about three weeks to prepare for our debut. The Sally Army bandmaster sat in on one of our practice evenings and decided we needed help. He made us understand the need for a repertoire and taught us the importance of practice, a bar at a time. He gave Joe confidence by telling him that he didn’t have to be able to read music; his job was to keep order, keep to a strict tempo and to impose his authority by whacking us with the baton if and when we got out of line. ‘Where did you get that twig, Joe?’ says the bandmaster, pointing to Joe’s treasured baton. ‘Sister Evie gave it to me.’ The bandmaster disappeared and came back with a stick similar to the canes we had known at school. ‘This will do you far better than that flimsy thing,’ he says to Joe. ‘Just give them a whack every now and again. Even if they don’t deserve it whack them all the same.’ To Joe’s credit he ignored that particular pearl of wisdom.
Finally, the great day arrived: our debut in the world of dance music. What saved us was the insistence of ‘the General’, as we called the bandmaster, on the importance of tempo. If you’re playing music to dance to then keeping the correct time is more important than hitting the right notes. The General knew a thing or two about dance bands. Thanks to him we now had a repertoire of about thirty songs which I shuffled around for the next six weeks as the resident band of the Tonbridge Club. The General and his wife kept our noses to the grindstone. We knew that none of us would ever be able to match the dexterity of Django Reinhardt and his sidekick Stéphane Grappelli, but you can’t say we didn’t try.
The Tonbridge Club with its Saturday night dances became a beacon for the boys and girls of the neighbourhood. Then another crony from my childhood past turned up to join in the mêlée that was the small square dance floor at the club.
29
Defending Sidmouth Street
I had known Eddie Mathews since my earliest days at infants’ school. Eddie had always been one of the scruffiest of the scruffs, a prime example of the kids who came out of the hovels of Sidmouth Street, but here was Eddie in a well-tailored suit, flash tie and a pair of shiny shoes on his feet that would have put Fred Astaire to shame, walking in to one of the Saturday night hops at the Tonbridge with a couple of his mates in tow, both equally shined up.
The girls immediately started fiddling with their make-up. In no time at all the music came to a stop and there we all were shaking hands and remarking how well we were all looking. Less than three years ago we’d been knocking each other’s blocks off. So it ended up with me and Eddie chatting away in a corner of the hall. It turned out that Eddie was part of a small gang that got its living by doing a bit of breaking and entering, mainly small shops and offices up West. They’d got a dealer in Somers Town that took anything worthwhile and if they could manage two decent capers a week it was better than working for wages. ‘What you think, Vic? If you’re interested, you’re in.’ Eddie knew it was safe to confide in me; he remembered me as one of the gang. I was up there with the best of them. I told him I would think about it, which really meant that I was beginning to tire of my ‘safe’ job at Pickford’s and was ready for pastures new. Did I know anything about acetylene torches? This meant one thing only: safes. I told Eddie that I did indeed know how to operate a torch. When I met up with the gang for the second time, they said they had been told about an easy lift in some offices in Hatton Garden – uncut stones, no less, a real doddle. Not one of these potential number one villains had yet reached the age of seventeen. ‘Working for wages is a mug’s game, Vic, come and take a dekko at my motor.’ Eddie showed me his Wolseley Ten. He wasn’t eighteen yet so he’d taxed it in his dad’s name. ‘Fink about it, Vic.’
In the meantime our tenure at the Tonbridge Club was coming to an end, as were the days of the small-time dance halls. In their place, huge, glamorous Palais de Danse were springing up all over London, with their magnificent floors and the glitz and dazzle of the modern décor, and big-name bands. Saturday night at the Palais was the place to be seen strutting your stuff and making it with the impressive array of skirt that was always on parade. The Hot Club de King’s Cross was about to pass into history. Joe tried his utmost to keep us together but in spite of our energy and keenness we just weren’t good enough. Joe Brown’s Masters of Rhythm slipped into history and nobody missed us.
Discord between husband and wife was such a common occurrence that normally little notice was taken of a family bust-up. Sometimes a neighbour might shout out of a window telling the perpetrators to ‘Knock it off, you two’, or something less politely worded and more to the point.
One young couple who lived two doors away from us and up on the second floor were going at it hammer and tongs. When the girl started screaming the neighbours sensed that this was no ordinary marital dispute. Suddenly the screaming stopped. The small crowd which had gathered in the street below was beginning to disperse when there was a terrific crash as the girl hurled herself out of the window to smash, a couple of seconds later, on to the pavement below.
The ambulance from the station in Herbrand Street, just around the corner, was on the scene in minutes, closely followed by a police van. The law took the struggling young husband away to the cells in Judd Street and next day we learnt that their little girl had been taken into care.
Family fights were a daily occurrence, but women didn’t usually throw themselves out of windows. The favoured way of exiting the wretchedness of life in the slums of King’s Cross was to shut all the doors and windows, turn on the gas tap, place a pillow on the lowered door of the gas oven and go to sleep.
The second tragedy to hit the street came some weeks after the death of the young woman. The street woke to find the police had formed a cordon around one of the dwellings. In it a wife and the three young children had been discovered in a roomful of blood. Their throats had been cut while they slept. The husband had scarpered and had yet to be found. I think both these two tragic events had a very strong effect on me and on the decisions I was about to make.
Eddie came round to see me again and told me he was very keen about my using the acetylene torch. I offered to have a look at it for him and discovered that he had no oxygen bottle to go with it and didn’t even know one was necessary. I told him to get someone to lift a full bottle from the engineer’s yard at the back of Euston Station: ‘They just leave ’em lying around, they wheel them round in pairs fixed to a trolley so you’ll have to nick two together. Let me know when you’ve got the gear.’ Eddie gave me a slap on the back. ‘I knew you’d see sense at last, Vic.’
Eddie didn’t understand that while I was willing to give him the info about getting the oxygen I was going to s
teer clear of becoming involved in any more criminal adventures. I finished up giving him and his mates the lowdown on using the acetylene but turned down Eddie’s offer of taking part in ‘a nice little earner’, as he put it. In the end he and his two mates managed to lay their hands on the oxygen bottle but then discovered it was going to take a much larger team to carry out their diamond caper. It seemed to me that three teenagers with no organisational skills were on a hiding to nothing. And I was right: within six months Eddie and his gang were doing a stretch in Brixton Prison and in those days if you were handed a five-year stretch then that is what you served.
As we got older the influence of our street gangs began to wane. We were all going our own separate ways, forming new attachments and taking on jobs that took us out of the area. Mixing with girls no longer marked you out as a cissy. We never lost our suspicion of authority and this was made worse by the things that were happening around us.
Mosley’s fascist party was making big trouble. In the poorer areas of London, the East End and south of the river, ordinary people were divided into those who had work and those who hadn’t. Those with work were, on the whole, anti-fascist; men on the dole, on the other hand, followed the Mosley line that it was all the fault of the Jews and immigrants. The fighting in the streets changed; it was no longer gangs bashing each other up for the fun of it. Mosley was stirring things up and the result was racial hatred.
One Saturday morning in late March I was in one of the local cafés in Gray’s Inn Road, run by a man called Frankie, whose real name wasn’t actually Frank but Franz. He was a German ex-prisoner of war and had met and married a girl from King’s Cross. They’d run the café from as long as us lads could remember; the old man wanted to call the café after his son, also called Franz, but sensibly decided that ‘Frankie’s café’ was better than ‘Franz’s café’.
Young Franz, also known as Frankie, was in our own age group.
It was the older Franz who first introduced the locals to frankfurters. His missus used to cook them in a large boiler in the backyard and the smell of the cooking sausages drifted through the neighbourhood with the result that the café was seldom empty.
There was more to the café’s activities than supplying food and drink, however. It also provided a useful service to some of the local villains. In the distant past Franz senior had been apprenticed to a master jeweller, and any small trinkets that ‘just happened to be left lying around’ were taken in to the café, the stones removed and set to one side and the gold and silver melted down. Franz with his frankfurters and his little bit of fencing on the side was all right. He was one of us and a decent bloke, even if he was old enough to be our father.
I went into Frankie’s one day to find Frankie junior and four of the lads deeply into a game of solo. The cash on the table indicated that this was a serious game. One of the players was Roscoe, the Jewboy clarinet player from our now forgotten dance band. Roscoe was moaning that the game was a fiddle while the other three were raking in their winnings. The game ended and Frankie had put a pot of tea on the table, with some bread rolls and half a dozen of those tasty frankfurters, and as we got stuck into the feast the four of them brought me up to date on what had been happening, especially an attack on Solly’s greengrocery shop in Sidmouth Street. ‘A gang of kids threw a brick through Solly’s window yesterday.’ Rozzie summed the situation up: ‘We’re waiting to see what happens next. We reckon that as there’s two Jewboy shops next to each other a repeat performance is on the cards, in which case we’re going to do the Blackshirts over good and proper.’
The two ‘Jewboy shops’ in question were Ruby Solomon’s greengrocer shop and Bernie Morris’s oil shop, actually opposite each other on the corners of Prospect Terrace and Sidmouth Street. The Solomons had two boys, who most of our lot had known since infants’ school. The elder was nicknamed Solly but no one ever knew his real Christian name. Solly he was and always would be. His younger brother was called Isaac and of course we called him Izzy. The pair of them were always together. Solly belonged to the local boxing club and modelled his style of fighting on that of the illustrious Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg, ‘the Whitechapel Whirlwind’. Nobody messed with Solly: he was ‘one of us’.
Ruby Solomon was the matriarch of the family and a lady of wide proportions. She sat out on her front steps and held court with all the other women at her end of Sidmouth Street. Everyone called her ‘Mrs Ruby’. She feared neither man nor beast. More importantly, it was well known in the area that Ruby never refused a plea for ‘something on the slate’. At the other end of the street was the redoubtable ‘Auntie Elsie’, a part-time midwife and sort of mother confessor. Auntie Elsie was yet another of that breed of woman who stood no nonsense from anybody. If by chance any Blackshirt gang did come around to create havoc then they would find that the wagons were circled against them. Inevitably, probably encouraged by the ease with which they had got away with the attack on the Solomons’ shop, they came back for a second helping.
Roscoe and the crew he had gathered around him had been in the café since late morning; it was now late in the afternoon and they were on the point of calling the whole thing off. Then in dashed one of the small kids. ‘There’s a gang of ’em coming down from Swinton Street.’ ‘’Ow many?’ ‘About a ’undred.’ ‘’Ow many did you say?’ ‘Well, a lot of ’em.’ By this time we could hear the racket they were making. I worked out that we had about twenty, top whack, nevertheless we kept to the plan: half down to the other end of the street, the other half to let the enemy pass and then close up the street and get them in the net.
As it turned out, and luckily for us, there weren’t a hundred of them or anything like. The actual force was about ten of the hard nuts with the usual complement of onlookers and do-nothing supporters. In no time the Blackshirts (they were actually wearing their uniform) were herded together and pushed and shoved into the alleyway at the bottom of Prospect Terrace where they were brutally beaten up; arms and legs were broken, faces slashed, blood everywhere and when it was thought that they had been taught a lesson the defenders of Sidmouth Street disappeared from the scene.
This little fracas took place on Saturday afternoon and on Monday it was front-page news in the national dailies, blazed in big, forbidding, block capitals: ‘KING’S CROSS GANG’S RIOUTOUS BEHAVIOUR’, ‘INNOCENT CITIZENS ATTACKED’, ‘LONDON GANGS MARAUD THE STREETS’, ‘INNOCENT PEDESTRIANS ASSAULTED IN SIDMOUTH STREET’. They were full of it, and there was nothing about poor old Solly’s window being smashed. Police from another area came banging on doors in an attempt to identify the culprits but it was futile.
The press kept the pressure up for the rest of the week. I think another of Mosley’s mobs took a similar battering elsewhere. Roscoe and his little army maintained their vigilance, expecting a revenge attack at any minute, but the Blackshirts kept away from our part of the Gray’s Inn Road and never bothered the area again. They tried to get a meeting going in Chapel Street in Somers Town but yet again they received a hiding.
30
Helping Out Abe
Towards the end of 1936 I packed in the job with Pickford’s. About the same time I enrolled in an evening class at St Martin’s School of Art so that I could continue with my music lessons. This was partly because my mother pleaded with me not to waste what she believed was my vocation in life. She really believed that my destiny lay in music. Mum had a point: so by enrolling I at least made her happy.
St Martin’s had its premises in one of the more unsavoury areas of the West End of London. Outside the gates of this highly-thought-of school were Pulteney and Berwick Street markets, and just to the east were the vice dens of Soho. In our small class of seven pupils there were four of us on violin, a couple of girls struggling to learn the cello and one on guitar. The class would start at seven thirty sharp, with each of us giving a rendering of whatever practice pieces we had been given the week before. The tutors were usually members of the bigger London orchestras and it w
as their way of earning a bit on the side. Everything was very easy-going but we learnt something about music and how it was constructed. And so I met up with Ron who, like me, was doing a stint at St Martin’s to please his parents. We both enjoyed making music but got mightily bored with the technical side. We were both young and all we wanted to do was to copy our favourites. Like me and my other pals, Ron and I couldn’t get enough of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, much to the annoyance of our tutor who looked on any form of modern music as an abomination.
Ron’s family had come to England to escape some sort of oppression in Italy. His real name was Ronaldo. The family name was Beretta but they called themselves Barrett and owned a small restaurant just around the corner from Percy Street, to the west of the Tottenham Court Road. After class at St Martin’s, Ron and I usually spent an hour or two there, supping coffee and munching the occasional sandwich, all supplied free of charge. Ron’s Mum and Dad seemed happy that their son had a mate who shared his interest in music. Ron was far more gifted than I would ever be, but we worked well together and when we played as a duo in the restaurant the customers seemed to enjoy our efforts, even if we weren’t quite up to the standard of Grappelli and Reinhardt. The infamous Fitzroy Tavern was just around the corner from Percy Street and if the Tavern’s clientele needed a cup of decent coffee to sober them up after a day’s carousing it was to Ron’s family restaurant that they wended their unsteady way. So the place was always full with a ragbag of writers, poets and other arty-crafty hangabouts. I had drawn my last pay packet from Pickford’s on the Friday and, the following Wednesday, Ron and I were sitting in the restaurant enjoying a cup of tea and I was moaning about finding worthwhile work when up to our table comes a big, burly character. ‘You out of a job, son?’ I must have nodded or said something to the affirmative. ‘I can give you a job if you’re not too particular,’ says this bloke. ‘You won’t make a fortune but it’s work and if you do a good job, you’ll get well paid. Can you ride a bike?’
