The Last Real Gangster

by Freddie Foreman

  My brother Herbie was at Arnhem. That’s him (second from right) at a memorial for the fallen in 1965. Ten thousand men went there; two thousand returned. Eight thousand were taken prisoner, wounded or killed. It was one of the biggest blunders of the war, Montgomery’s idea – a bridge too far, as they called the film about it. They only landed with what they could carry – machine guns and light Sten guns – and a big battalion of Tiger tanks had moved in there. They had no chance.

  It all went quiet for a period, so we stayed where we were right throughout the war, until the very end, when the V-1 flying bombs – the doodlebugs – started. Oh, fuck me, those were nasty! During the day they gave you a warning, you had to get to the shelters. On one particular day my father was on fire warden duty. You could always hear that drone, even if you were in the shelter, and then it’d stop.

  Oh, please, don’t stop! Drop on some other poor bastard, not on us!

  Then it’d start up again and go a bit further.

  Oh, thank God for that!

  It was when it shut off that you were waiting for the bang, the explosion.

  Down below, we felt the ground lift up. There was dust and all the lights went out. Everyone started crying and screaming. Some time went by and this one particular couple went up. They said our block of flats had been hit on the corner; our flat was right in the middle. My father came down, covered in brick dust, with congealed blood covering his forehead. My mother was all tearful.

  ‘We lost everything, Lou,’ he told her. ‘It’s all wiped out.’

  All she had was this big old leather handbag full of her belongings.

  Eventually we went up to look at the flat. Where we used to huddle together was just concrete. There were a few deaths – people who were in the building. We got sent to another address in Battersea.

  I was evacuated again. My brother Herbie’s girlfriend’s parents had a shoe shop in Northampton; she had a nice old boy with a wooden leg that was just a piece of wood, not like what they’ve got today. Her mother used to say, ‘Get that leg out the way!’ and kick it when it stuck out – she wasn’t very nice.

  She got me working in there, cleaning the windows at the back of the house. I was looking over the back of the garden fence and I heard this woman telling her posh little boy he mustn’t talk to me any more – ‘You’re speaking like he speaks!’ – because I was a cockney boy. That was my friend gone.

  Anyway, I was sitting on the windowsill; I rolled down the sunblind and fell into the main road! Right in front of a fucking bus! It stopped in front of me and I broke my arm. They put me in plaster and I remember how I liked being off school, getting a bit of sympathy and attention. I went to the cinema and the usherette said, ‘What have you done to your arm, sonny?’ I played on that, didn’t I? The cinema was empty, it was freezing cold in the afternoon, but it was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and I really enjoyed watching that film.

  I went back home and by then we were living down in Wickersley Road, off the Wandsworth Road. We had no furniture left because we’d lost everything, so they gave us this utility furniture made out of Lyon’s tea chests.

  My brothers were all overseas; they were in nine different campaigns from North Africa to Sicily and the European campaign, including D-Day. They all saw a lot of action and Herbie finished up in Japan at the end of the war, taking the colonial prisoners of war from the Japanese. So, even when the war was over in Germany, he was still out in the Pacific. They took a few of the fucking Japanese guards out when they saw what they’d done and the state of the prisoners. It wasn’t properly disclosed but they saw the emaciation, and that they’d been chopping heads off with samurai swords. They found the store open and every parcel from the Red Cross was there; they hadn’t given them to the prisoners at all. The prisoners were picking grains of rice out of the fucking dirt and the Japanese were giving it large in their smart uniforms! So, they chased them all round the camp and done ’em. But that story’s not been told.

  This was after the war, about 1948. I think there might be a drop of foreign blood in me. My mother was very dark, with long black hair, but my brother George is blond and blue-eyed so I don’t know what my mother was up to, years ago! These two are young guys I used to knock around with (Billy Adams – left – and Joe Turner at the Roehampton open-air swimming pool); one of them is dead now and I don’t know about the other one.

  Recently, I went back to my roots at the Battersea Boxing Club, at the Latchmere pub, where I had quite a few amateur fights. We used to fight the Army, the Navy, the Police Force, Nine Elms baths and Tooting Bec baths – they used the baths as boxing arenas for the amateur shows. I belonged to Jack Solomon’s Nursery. His gymnasium was above a snooker hall in Windmill Street, Soho; there was a salt-beef bar underneath it. My old man and my brothers used to come to watch me box. At Jack Solomon’s on a Sunday morning you used to see all the top fighters coming over from America to fight Bruce Woodcock and Freddie Mills. We were really into all that. We’d listen to all the fights on the crystal set back in Sheepcote Lane, like when Tommy Farr fought Joe Louis – we thought he’d won it because it sounded like he had by the commentary, but he didn’t get the decision. Boxing was the main sporting interest then rather than football, but Chelsea were just over the bridge and my brothers used to support them.

  In those days, every Saturday night there would be a fight outside the pub; blood on the cobbles. They’d all form a circle, and my old man used to fight this guy called Johnny Whicker. He had loads of fights with him and it was, ‘Who’s going to fucking win this one?’ It was a real rivalry between the two of them. Whicker was half-related to the family; he was someone’s husband. But, even when we used to have a party at Sheepcote Lane, they’d be all round the piano, singing and drinking – then they’d be screaming and hollering. It’d be the old man and Johnny Whicker having a straightener outside the door. I can remember watching them roll around the ground, punching each other.

  But boxing was just learning how to defend yourself and boxers were the heroes of the day. Herbie got involved in boxing and ‘Boy’ Bessell, an area champion, used to come from Bristol to visit us, so that was another incentive for teaching you how to shape up. Jack Sullivan was famous then, and he was the reason why I joined Battersea Boxing Club. When I went over to Solomon’s gym with all the professionals, my father and his friends would come and sit on these trestles to watch them sparring, training and working out.

  I used to go to Bud Flanagan’s Crazy Gang Show at the Victoria Palace because he would sponsor the young boxers. Flanagan had a little place just round the corner and it was the first fucking time I’d been to a restaurant! He treated us all to a bowl of tomato soup, all the junior boys. The film actor Stewart Granger used to come up there as a sponsor – he bought me these shorts with the ‘FF’ on (see next page). I trained indoors; my brothers had weights lying around and I used them too.

  I can remember fighting on the undercard at Manor Place Baths. I never had a dressing gown or anything like that. Henry Cooper, George Cooper, Dave Charnley, Charlie Tucker and Freddie Reardon were on the bill – all local fighters from south London. It was Henry Cooper’s first pro fight. Tommy Davey was the manager and he’d overmatched me with Del Breen from Croydon because this guy had had twenty fucking fights and won the last four on knockout! It was my first pro fight, so Davey tried to talk me out of it. I said, ‘I’ve told everyone I’m fighting now, I’ve gotta be on the bill!’

  Because I had a lot of friends and supporters I used to have a lot of fights over the coffee stalls. I’d bring blokes over to have a row with me – up at the Elephant & Castle, Tooting, World’s End, I used to go there just to have a fight.

  ‘Who’s the best fighter you’ve got round ’ere?’

  I pushed up the front but I was fighting full-grown men, not teenagers. I was scaffolding, saddling roofs and I’d worked in Smithfield meat market, carrying sides of beef about in cold stores, so I was a pretty strong kid. It was hard
fucking graft – I did it just to earn a few quid extra.

  But this night I was the first one on. I rushed there and got in the ring, just in my shorts and a towel. As the bell went I charged out to have a row, tripped over his foot and hit the ropes. I remember the crowd laughing. Though I didn’t go down, it made me feel a bit silly, gave me the hump; I suppose it was a bit comical. But then I got serious. We had six rounds of three minutes, which was a lot for a first fight. But I had a right fucking war! In the third round, I came out with some really good shots and put him down. I thought, ‘I’ve won this’ but at the end of the round the fucking bell saved him – they had to pick him up and put him in his corner.

  After the fight, the ‘nobbings’ started coming in the ring – half a crown, silver. I was paid twelve quid for the fight but got about twenty-odd quid nobbings. So did Del Breen, and that was money then. I got good write-ups in The Ring and Boxing News, and this was with top-rated fighters and future champions on the bill.

  The guy in my corner later said, ‘I could have made a champion out of Fred.’ Henry Cooper’s manager, Jim Wicks, declared, ‘He’ll never get an easy fight now, because he can’t be matched with novices like himself.’ I’d had twenty or thirty fights as an amateur, and I had a following of girls, all screaming their heads off. I liked the little bit of notoriety, of course, and it didn’t stop me pulling a few girls, either – they were a perk of the job. But Wicks turned out to be right.

  Then I got into thieving and that was easy money. Why get your brain scrambled for twelve or twenty quid when you can get a hundred quid out of thieving? I was nicking washing machines, spin dryers and Hoovers; when televisions started coming on the market, we were picking open the shops on half-day closing and going in there.

  With the boxing I might have made it, I might not. You just don’t know, do you?

  The picture overleaf (left) is me with my old girlfriend, Patsy Keith. She was a bookmaker’s daughter, a lovely girl. We had a little fling. Then I met my Maureen – that’s her on the motorcycle, the woman I married, with our Gregory at a year old. She got pregnant, so it was a bit of a fucking shotgun wedding!

  Milton Road was in Herne Hill – all the streets up there are named after the poets. We got a little ground-floor flat there. The girls in those days, they entrapped you, they set their sights on you: he’s a little bit of a money-getter, he keeps coming up in taxis and picking me up … She was working in a factory, pressing women’s clothes, so she stopped work from that day onwards! The next thing I know I’m getting married, we’re getting the bottom drawer ready.

  I was nineteen. Before that I’d already been in the nick: at sixteen I was nicked for affray after a gang fight – I was dragged into this retaliation by some kids who’d got beaten up. There was a boys’ club over on the North Dulwich– Peckham border; it was a rough area. Two mates of mine who used to go to the dancehalls had been battered by a mob out of the club. We had a bit of a skirmish and, the next thing you know, I’m fucking nicked! Nobody got hurt really badly, it was just the fact that these kids from Clapham had come over and had a fight in the street. It finished up in the club itself. We had a sand-weighted sock as a cosh!

  There were six of us from Clapham who ended up at the Old Bailey. It was ridiculous, really; it went on for over a week. One of the prosecution would hold up this smelly old sock away from his nose and say, ‘… and one sand-weighted sock.’ We used to have our heads down, but we’d repeat it, giggling every time he said it: ‘… and one sand-weighted sock!’ We all got fined a fiver. Sir Gerald Dodson was the judge and he gave us a right lecture: ‘When you walk out of here, look up at the sky. If you go on like this, you’re going to wind up doing prison time.’ As if we didn’t know what a cell was: we’d been in the fucking Old Bailey cells for a week!

  But I was sent to Stamford House, the remand centre at Shepherd’s Bush. It was known throughout the criminal fraternity – for years to come all the London villains I met in prisons up and down the country started off in Stamford House. It was a breeding ground for crime, this gaff; it hardened you.

  This is me with Tommy Wisbey (overleaf, top picture), later one of the Great Train Robbers, whom I’ve known since I was fifteen or sixteen, and a little team. The chauffeur/ driver took us down to the hop country in Kent to have a drink and a night out. There’s another picture of us below. Later on, I’d be godfather to his daughter, Marilyn. Tommy would lose his other daughter, Lorraine, while he was away: she was killed in a car crash. She was only sixteen.

  I had Tommy on the firm with me when we’d go rob the shops in Clapham on closing day: Wednesday or Thursday afternoon, that’s how it used to be in those days. ‘The Bosh’ was the guy who would make all the keys for you in alphabetical order and you used to keep trying them out till one threw the lock over. They were usually double-throw locks. Then we could walk in, walk round, come back and lock it up, then go to the end of the street to see if it was belled to the nick. Because there weren’t bells like there are today; people didn’t think it was necessary. I’d say 90 per cent of them had no alarms.

  We used to pull up in a van. I’d have a brown coat on and we would be ‘the workers’, carrying out the washing machines and radiograms over the pavement. We’d load up the van and we had them already sold. We’d fill out the orders: ‘My daughter’s getting married, can you get her a Hoover cleaner?’ That was how we performed.

  Tommy’s still alive, though his wife, Rene, has just died. Rene was my Maureen’s friend: ‘I’ve found a nice fella for you!’ Girls look after their mates, they plot and plan and scheme – and ensnare you. To not get married in the fifties when you got a girl pregnant, you were the dirtiest dog ever!

  At this time I went and bought this big old car (below) at the sale. You can see the ladder on the roof rack. This guy on the right, a Paddy, was the labourer; the guy on the far left was an electrician and a plumber, and my pal Horry Dance and myself were both thieves. We used to nick all the paint and all the materials, so we were alright for a bit of painting and decorating. We had a few contacts, and anything they wanted I’d go out and nick.

  We ran the painting-and-decorating firm for a couple of years; this is outside the house in Elsynge Road that Horry bought (he finished up buying about three houses). He carried on but I left it and sold the motor to my brother-in-law.

  The family had bucket-and-sponge days at all the racetracks and dog tracks. Maureen’s uncle took bets under the name Jack Ray; he was the first one to have a telephone, which he’d work with his feet, and put up runners from other racetracks on the board. It was all bollocks, because he was making his own prices up. He was a shrewd bastard, Jack! But he got five years for assault and got the birch – so he was a face. Gordon Goody, Tommy Wisbey and Buster Edwards got it in Wormwood Scrubs too – they’d stand you up against a cross and bind the birch twigs up into a whip. Prisons were brutal at that time.

  It had been a short period of trying to go straight but afterwards I took Tommy with me. Buster Edwards had just come out of the RAF and tried a window-cleaning business; that went pear-shaped, so he went to work for a florist called A.D. Warner in Lower Marsh, The Cut. He used to sell our goods for us to the stallholders. When he saw the sort of money we were making, he said, ‘Can’t I come to work for you?’ So I turned him into a fucking criminal because he was previously a straight-goer.

  Tommy Wisbey’s father used to stand on the corner of Cooks Road, Kennington, taking illegal bets. The coppers would run him down the nick for street bookmaking. He’d have to produce bodies for them: pay people to get nicked at Lambeth Court. I even did it myself once: all you did was take a few slips in your pocket, the copper took you in the nick and charged you. That was the crooked little coup. They had their lookouts. They came round as milkmen and coalmen; it was a game to a lot of them. Tommy’s old man had a bottle-washing yard and whoever was taking the bets used to go through the yard to escape.

  So, Tommy, Buster and I were the main th
ree during that period. We took a big van down to Southampton because we wanted to do this particular electrical supplier. We did it early morning so we could get back to London; we emptied the shop out – there was no one there – and put it all on the van. We loaded up and pulled off and then Tommy comes up the other side and tells us to pull over. We had a crooked Ford Zephyr to escort the van.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  We had a Decca radiogram that you screwed legs onto the bottom of; it was a great little seller. ‘That Decca,’ he said, ‘I’ve fuckin’ handled that!’ He meant his dabs would be on it, because we couldn’t walk across the pavement with gloves on. If two coppers walked by, chatting, I’d say, ‘Don’t worry, just keep normal.’ But it meant your dabs were on the gear you’d nicked.

  ‘I fuckin’ left it inside the door. I forgot to pick it up as I come out!’

  Buster and me drove back, by which time twenty minutes to half an hour had gone by. When we pulled up, there was a window cleaner at the front and right outside the shop was a fucking newspaper stand!

  ‘Front it up, front it up!’

  It had a Yale on it, as well as a dirty mortise lock, so we put a screwdriver in and knocked that off. Buster brings the radiogram out and puts it in the boot of the Zephyr, down the next street. But they’ve seen Buster and me. We catch up down a lay-by.

  ‘We’ve got it.’

  ‘Oh, thank God for that!’

  I drive back to London and I’ve got three lock-up garages I’m renting down Herne Hill.

  I had loads of bent gear in there – it was like a wholesale place, loads of LP records too. I had one of those little silver-grey Ford 500cwt vans; it was nice for me, and nice for taking the kids out. Tommy comes to me and says, ‘I’ve got a couple of customers.’ So we load up and off he goes in my van. But, instead of delivering the stuff, he goes to his father’s pitch. And while he’s there the Old Bill pounce, nicking them for street bookmaking.