by Suggs
It isn’t only the merchandise which is familiar at Bates. As I’m shown around the premises by the current owner, Timothy Boucher, I immediately spot an old friend, the diabolic conformature. Resisting the pull to feel the weight of it on my head once again, I move away and spot another familiar face across the shop floor - a member of the Bates family I’d been introduced to on my previous visit all those years ago. His name, I remember, is Binks, and I am pleased to see that he hasn’t changed, or indeed aged, in all that time. In fact, he hasn’t even moved in all that time. Hardly surprising, I suppose, since Binks is dead and has been for more than 80 years. Not only dead but stuffed as well, and displayed in a glass case attached to the wall above the till: a stationary tribute to the taxidermist’s art. I should add at this point that Binks is not an unfortunate shop assistant cut down in the service of hatting, but a cat.
According to Mr Boucher, Binks first ventured on to the premises in the 1920s - in the halcyon age when every London man worth his salt wore a hat from breakfast through till bedtime, and sometimes beyond. Whether Binks came in quest of a mouse or some headgear is unclear, but he was immediately adopted by the shop staff and has been a part of the furniture here ever since - metaphorically at first, but now quite literally. From the lofty vantage point of his glass case on the wall, he surveys his former domain with haughty insouciance, a silk top hat tipped at a suitably raffish angle on his head, and a cigarette lodged in his mouth to complete this tableau of feline contentment. He looks like the cat who got the cream, or in his case, the Player’s Navy Cut. And because he cannot move from his perch, he remains blissfully ignorant of the fact that beyond the doors of Bates the Hatters is an utterly changed world where all the old certainties have disappeared, a world where the deerstalker and bowler have given way to the baseball cap or - worse still - the simple, unadorned head of the human male, in all its unconformatured nakedness.
Saying goodbye to Bates, I’m back on Jermyn Street, and there’s one last place I want to visit before I head for home. A turn to the right carries me past the fragrant pong of the fancy cheese shop where the Queen buys her mature Cheddar and on towards another old friend that Beau would have recognised at once.
Did I mention that Beau was famous for washing every day - another habit we have in common, although it’s unusual for me to allocate three hours to the process? It’s said that he was so scrupulous in his ablutions that he never had the need to use scent or cologne to cover his traces. Beau may have been a stranger to BO, but the same boast could not be made by most of the other Regency bucks in eighteenth-century London, most of whom must have stunk like skunks. Unless, that is, they had an account at Floris & Co., 89 Jermyn Street.
Remarkably, this wonderfully fragrant survivor is still run today by descendants of the man who started the whole thing in 1730. That was the year when Juan Floris, a native of Menorca, arrived in London to seek his fortune. He began as a barber, but soon realised there was a market for selling the scents he squirted on his freshly cropped clients before they left the premises. Within a few years of buying his shop on Jermyn Street, he had a client list to die for, and had earned the first of many royal warrants as the king’s favoured ‘smooth-pointed comb-maker’. (History does not record who supplied the king’s rough-pointed combs, but whoever they were, they’ve long since bitten the dust.) They used to make all their fragrances in the basement of number 89, a tradition which only ended in the 1960s, when production was moved to a larger site outside London. You can still catch a glimpse of the basement through the blue grille on the pavement in front of the shop, but these days the interesting stuff is all above ground.
Pausing only to glance up at the rather impressive plasterwork of the royal warrant, which perches on a lintel above the front window of the shop, I step inside. The hustle and bustle of Piccadilly quickly recedes and I feel as though I’ve entered a world which I thought had vanished centuries ago, a world where banknotes are ironed and coins washed before they’re returned to the customer on a mahogany change-tray (a tradition that’s recently been phased out at my local Lidl). This sense of connection with the past is no doubt enhanced on my visit by the fact that the man who greets me as I step through the door is Juan Floris’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandson (that’s seven greats, if you weren’t counting).
As John Bodenham shows me round this wonderful time capsule of a place - all mirrors, mahogany and musk - I can almost imagine myself back in the eighteenth century. Flush from a reckless wager at White’s, I’d park up the sedan chair outside (no traffic cameras in those days, although I do notice a suspicious-looking chap with an easel) and nip in to pick up a fresh bottle of my favourite pong before setting off for a debauched night of carousing in the company of my dandified cronies. And even if Beau himself was unlikely to appear round the corner to greet me, at least the mirrored display cabinets that line the walls are the very ones he might have peered into two centuries ago as he checked to see that his cravat was still as shipshape and elegant as it was when he put it on that morning before an audience of admiring fashionistas.
Sadly, this fragrant flight of fancy is abruptly halted when John explains that the mahogany cabinets which grace the shop today aren’t original, as I’ve assumed. Worse still, they’ve been acquired second-hand - hardly fitting fittings, I suggest, for a shop with such grand associations. But it turns out that I am wrong on that score. They may not be original, but these display cases still have a pretty distinguished pedigree: before they graced the Floris HQ, they’d been used to show off precious objects at the celebrated Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. In 1851, after the show was over, they were snapped up by Floris and installed in the shop. If they’d been good enough for Queen Victoria, I decide, they are good enough for me. I withdraw my complaint and move quickly on towards a room at the back of the shop, where I’ve spotted a white-coated lady seated at a table covered in a glittering array of glass bottles. What, I wonder, is a chemist doing here?
The vision in white - Sheila is her name - is Floris’s resident perfumier. If you don’t fancy any of the many tried-and-tested scents on sale in the front of the shop, you can, for a price, step into Sheila’s fragrance factory and work with her to create one of your very own. The bottles on the table contain some of the 4,000 different scents she mixes and matches to create her unique blends, their labels announcing such exotic ingredients as tonka bean and galbanum oil. It takes several months of consultations and experimentation to finalise a bespoke scent, so, fighting the urge to carve my own niche in the pantheon of perfumiers, I decide to opt for something prêt-a-snorter instead and head back out front to make my selection.
The Floris order books are a veritable compendium of famous names, and a quick flick through the pages reveal that I am just the latest in a long line of sophisticated fashion icons to come calling. Besides the great Beau himself, who regularly stopped in for a chat, the list of clients includes more royals than even the most rabid revolutionary would want to shake a stick at, some redoubtable women (Eva Peron and Florence Nightingale to name but two) and a couple of legendary writers - Oscar Wilde and James Bond creator Ian Fleming. Oscar’s favourite scent was a concoction called Malmaison, named after the Malmaison carnation, apparently the buttonhole of choice for elegant Victorians. Fleming’s choice, named after the street number of the Floris shop itself, was No. 89, a taste he shared with his own fictional hero. When he wasn’t saving the world, the great Bond took baths in water fragranced with Floris Lime Bath Essence - a pleasing example of early product placement for which I hope the author was appropriately rewarded. (Note to editor: please don’t cut this bit, we’ll split any kickbacks 50-50.)
Having made my selection - a bottle of Bond’s favourite No. 89 as it happens - I leave Floris’s feeling fragrant and refreshed. I almost expect a total stranger to walk up and hand me a bouquet of flowers just like they do in the adverts, but the closest I get is a guy with a flyer for Golf World. Even that affro
nt (do I look like a golfer?) doesn’t dash my spirits as I wander down the street and back towards Beau.
My travels in his bubbly-bright bootsteps have thrown up a few surprises, not least the discovery that the greatest dandy of them all was not quite the peacock I’d thought him to be. As I walk past the statue of the great man himself, still perched on his pedestal and surveying his domain, I take it as a compliment that he doesn’t turn to watch me as I go. I know you’ll tell me it’s because he’s made of bronze, but I prefer to think it’s his way of giving me the thumbs up for my understated style and classy deportment. Thank goodness I left the red socks and hanky combo in the wardrobe today.
CHAPTER FIVE
From A to B
Listen, boys and girls, I’m gonna tell you a story… If you are old enough, you’ll read that in the voice of Max Bygraves, a variety performer of yesteryear. This particular story is about a long-ago city whose streets were full of horses. No, it’s not My Little Ponyville. It’s London Town.
I never thought I would be interested in horses except as vehicles carrying hopes of a big win. I didn’t think the equine community and I shared much in common until I realised - and I confess the realisation came only recently - that I had actually shared my first adult home with a horse. Before I go much further and alarm friends and family, let me clarify.
The first house I bought was a mews house and there was probably a gap of 80 years or so between my residence and the departure of its equine inhabitants. Actually, Anne and I bought it from a potter who was sleeping upstairs and using the cobbled stalls as her studio, kiln and all. I suppose the potter’s residence threw me off the scent a bit, but I don’t think much of the internal structure had really changed since its horsey beginnings. And, of course, mews houses are dotted all over London because, along with London’s potters and musicians, the city was once full of horses needing homes. So I thought I would try to follow the trail that takes us from a transport system dominated by the nag to the glorious mess brought about by the combustion engine that we currently enjoy. Musing on our mews took me back to my first experience of parking a car in our cobbled stall in December 1981. It’s not primarily why I remember that month more vividly than others from the 1980s, but it is a contributory factor.
December 1981 was a month of momentous events in my life, parking aside. As that old French crooner Maurice Chevalier sang, ‘Ah yes, I remember it well.’ ‘It Must Be Love’, our ninth top-ten single in a row or something, was flying up the charts; we’d just bought our first house, the mews house in question; and I was about to marry Anne. I was 21 years old and it was nearly Christmas.
The group had been so busy touring and recording that there was a window of just a few days to get married and have a honeymoon. We got married on 21 December. It snowed and we had the whitest of white weddings in a church in Kentish Town. It was a beautiful affair and family and friends galore retired to Lauderdale House in Highgate for drinks and music and dance. After which Anne and I were whisked off to spend our two-day honeymoon in the Ritz in Piccadilly before I was off on the road again.
What Anne didn’t know was that I had also organised to buy her a car as a wedding and Christmas present. I’d managed to track down Anne’s favourite, a Karmann Ghia. These beauties were designed by Mr Porsche but have a VW engine. A perfect mixture of style and reliability, a bit like me.
The only problem was that the car was in Luton. Which even those with a poor grasp of geography will know is not actually in London. So on the first morning of married life, and on the pretext of sorting something out at our mews cottage in Camden, I left Anne at the Ritz having breakfast and struck north for Bedfordshire.
I roped in Lee Thompson, mate and Madness sax player, to join me as co-driver/pilot. We arrived in Luton to find the car was in beautiful nick, British racing-green with black-leather interior. Lee did all the tutting and sucking air between his teeth, while kicking the tyres and stroking the paintwork. It’s an ancient ritual men in these situations do, just like builders when they come through the front door of a possible new job. Hands were shaken and a deal was done. I was anxious to get back to my bride at the Ritz, but the words speed and haste could not be used to describe our journey back to London.
After half an hour of scraping the ice off the windscreen, and that was just on the inside, we were off. Wahey! We lurched forward, leaping and skidding on the slippery road, the previous owner’s smile rapidly evaporating as he leapt out of the way. We were heading back into town, albeit in first gear.
Though the car was a thing of beauty, it was not luxurious. It was built in the mid-70s and was functionally pretty basic. Because it was so cold, the windows were constantly steaming up. The heating consisted of a lever you slid from left to right, blue to red, cold to warm. Unfortunately, it took the length of the journey back to London before anything approaching warm air was coming out.
The journey took a good few hours. Lee had politely declined to help with the driving and was preoccupied with window-scraping duties. My abiding memory of that perilous journey back was of the car skating across empty London streets and a navigation error that took us kangaroo-leaping over a snow-covered London Bridge, the beautiful sights of the city barely visible through the steamed-up windscreen.
I finally made it back to Camden in pitch darkness. It must have been around four-ish. Never mind - at least I was home now. As I carefully navigated the car into the cobbled lane on which our new home stood, I felt a surge of relief - surely the worst was over? All I had to do now was park Anne’s new motor and nip back to the Ritz and wedded bliss. I’d been away all day - that would take some explaining. I had to consider the possibility of ruining the surprise and actually telling the truth.
Like snooker, parking is all about angles. I was tired and am no Pythagoras. As beads of perspiration pricked my forehead, and gears crashed, I edged forward and back hundreds of times, and began to question the point not only of cars, but also of life itself. I wondered why I had bought the house without considering practicalities like parking. Roger Moore - the Saint - never had a problem with his mews pad and his motor. Maybe it was the car, or maybe it was me? I settled on it being the car.
I did eventually get the car into the stall and once it was perfectly tethered with a giant bow around it I headed back to Anne. When I finally arrived at the Ritz it was well into the evening, and I had told my new wife I was just popping out for a couple of hours. She hadn’t called all the hospitals in London and no search party had been sent out for me, but I think it’s fair to say that when you have only two days together for your honeymoon, disappearing for one of them is not ideal. I think the car and the bow and Anne’s knowledge of my driving skills was explanation enough. It must have been, because if you fast-forward to the present we are still together, with two lovely daughters.
Back to that cobbled street. With the benefit of hindsight, perhaps I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself. While I wasn’t exactly James Hunt (another fellow mews dweller in his time), the truth was that the street was very narrow and the stall tiny. Our lovely new mews pad hadn’t, after all, been designed to accommodate people like us who wanted somewhere to park their car, though it seemed perfectly suited to that purpose, and cheap into the bargain. It was, as I now know, built for horses. And horses have a very tight turning circle.
By all accounts, Victorian mews quarters were cramped, smelly and unsanitary, and, remembering the layout of our house, I wouldn’t have wanted to share it with a horse. It’s one thing to live cosy with your Karmann Ghia, as we did - we could keep an eye on ours through an internal window, while sitting in front of a fire - it’s quite another to sleep above a stable. The idea was to keep grooms and carriages close to the big house so that its inhabitants could make that impromptu trip across town for a game of cribbage. The horses were effectively lodged at the end of the garden, hidden from public view and - crucially - down-wind from the nostrils of the rich folks.
We cou
ld only get sight of the big house that would once have owned our little hovel if we clambered up on to our roof, which, of course, being young, lithe and athletic things, we often did. Up on the roof (I’ve started humming along with the Drifters) we had a view of the world as it was 100 years before: the backs of vast houses, five or six storeys high, loomed at the end of long gardens. Most of the big houses had been turned into flats and their gardens parcelled up, while our little house was pretty much as it always had been, cobbles and all.
I am not a horse-rider. I tried once and I fell off. I had sort of assumed that, apart from the mounted police, royalty and the military, no one goes riding in London and that the mews houses, like my own first home, have for many years all been fitted out for human rather than equine habitation. But, in the spirit of adventure, I was curious to find out what our place would have looked like when Dobbin and co were in situ.
So to find out more I headed for Elvaston Mews in west London, to check out a mews stable that was still operating as originally intended, one of London’s last livery yards. It is just a brisk walk from Hyde Park, which at over 350 acres is the largest area of open land in central London and a place where generations of fashionable Londoners have come to exercise their horses. Heading south from the park’s fading red gates, I strode down Queen’s Gate and passed one of London’s many statues of men on horseback. This one is of the obscure Lord Napier of Magdala, a Victorian military man who in 1868 captured a fortress called Magdala in Abyssinia, modern-day Ethiopia. A final-year student at the nearby Royal College of Art, Eleonora Aguiari, wrapped Lord Napier, horse, plinth and all in bright-red duct tape as part of her end-of-year show in 2004, her aim to bring public attention to the obscure and ignored topics of the past, like Lord Napier’s imperial campaign.
