by Chris Welch
Peter’s mother tried her best to adapt to her new home and took a secretarial job with the Church of England’s Pension Board. Despite this touch of respectability, a twangy South London accent and tough attitude meant there seemed little chance that her son Peter would make it beyond the lower rungs of society. According to his teacher’s somewhat despairing school report: “The boy will never make anything of his life.” Indeed, so poor was his mother that for a period little Peter was placed in a children’s home. Even his limited schooling was disrupted, this time by the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939. With bombs raining down, London was no place for a child and four-year-old Peter was evacuated with thousands of others to the safety of the country. In his case, the entire school was relocated to Charterhouse, a famous public school not far from Godolming, deep in the wealthy stockbroker belt of the Surrey countryside.*
It was a far cry from the smoky streets of Battersea and Grant later talked of the way he was looked down upon by the public schoolboys he encountered. It’s not surprising that he developed an early antipathy towards the pervasive effects of class-consciousness in society, not to mention a withering attitude towards the upper-middle classes, especially those to whom fortune came without fortitude.
It certainly made him all the more determined to become a success, whatever his origins. As he said somewhat bitterly: “You can imagine. The scum had arrived from Battersea. They loathed us. World War Two was on and there was another war going on down there that nobody knew about. There used to be great battles and we’d beat them up.”
After the war Peter returned to his mother in Battersea. Of his schooldays little is known, though it can be assumed that the world of academe held no attraction whatsoever. By his own account, he left school at the age of 13 and took a labouring job at a sheet metal factory a few miles away in Croydon. Peter lasted just five weeks in his one and only factory job. “I knew it just wasn’t for me,” he confessed later. “I had a bad, bad education. It was all mixed up with being evacuated during the war and my circumstances … not knowing my father.”
Says his daughter Helen: “He never did anything at school. He was never an academic. But when his headmaster gave him that horrible report, it gave him an incentive. He thought: ‘Right, sod you, I’m going to do something.’” Peter realised from an early age that if he were to achieve anything in life, he’d have to do it on his own terms, by the force of his personality and, if necessary, sheer physical strength. Fortunately, he was well endowed in that department, so much so that future employers probably assumed he was considerably older than he really was.
Attracted by the allure of show business, he took a more interesting job than sheet metal bashing, working as a stagehand at the Croydon Empire, a mecca for mass entertainment in south London. In 1948, before the arrival of television, variety and the cinema happily co-existed in the same premises. South London was full of superbly appointed cinemas with evocative names, Odeons, Rialtos and Gaumonts, where the magic of the silver screen offered a brief respite from the drudgery of post-war England. The Empire was situated at 94 North End, Croydon and opened as a music hall in 1906. It converted into a movie house in the Thirties, featuring a mixture of talkies, newsreels and the occasional ‘live’ variety act. There were so many cinemas in the locality that from 1938 onwards the Empire became a ‘live’ entertainment venue only.
When Peter Grant became an eager, 13-year-old stagehand, earning fifteen shillings a night, the Empire was owned by the Hyams Brothers. They had bought the theatre in 1946 and continued the policy of staging ‘live’ shows. In this rather oddly designed building, with its narrow street entrance leading to a grand foyer, young Peter caught his first glimpse of the stars of the day, albeit somewhat downmarket ‘artistes’ on variety bills. One of the last shows put on at the Empire, before it converted to the Eros Cinema in the early Fifties, was called Soldiers In Skirts. Skirts may well have been on Peter’s mind as he excitedly swept up the stage, pulled back the curtains and ogled the actresses.
The Croydon Empire/Eros Cinema closed in May 1959 and was demolished to make way for a barren concrete shopping centre. However the closure of many such theatres did not deter the young stagehand from pursuing his dreams. It was an era of almost full employment and jobs were easy to come by for someone to whom work was second nature. Unemployment was never an option for Peter Grant and, eager for adventure and undaunted by his lack of education, he took a wide variety of casual jobs. They included working as a waiter at Frascati’s restaurant in Soho and as a messenger for Reuters, the international news agency, in Fleet Street. He delivered the latest news photographs, taking wet prints on his arm to the various newspaper offices that lined the street that in those days was the heart of London’s newspaper business.
In 1953, at the age of 18, Grant was called up to do his obligatory two years of National Service in the Army. Under the terms of the National Service Act of 1948, all of Britain’s young men were called upon to undergo two years’ military training. This was the first time that compulsory military service had been introduced in Britain outside of wartime, and its very existence contributed to the air of drabness and repression that pervaded the early Fifties.
It also evoked an atmosphere of authoritarianism in which young men of Peter’s age and background were encouraged to believe that they should defer to their ‘elders and betters’. Teenage years – that sublime interval between leaving school and adulthood – simply did not exist; whatever revolt may have been kindling in the soul was extinguished by the army.
This wholesale aura of oppression almost certainly supplied the launch-pad for the Teddy Boy phenomenon, which in the early-Fifties was beginning to emerge in working-class areas like Battersea and Clapham. In what history generally records as the first great youth cult of the 20th century, lads just out of the Army threw away their uniforms and ‘demob suits’ and, in a kind of homage to pre-war Edwardian fashions, began wearing drainpipe trousers and thigh-length drape jackets with velvet collars. Visitors to the Festival Of Britain Funfair in Battersea Park in 1951 were alarmed to see the first wave of Teddy Boys and their girlfriends rampaging around the grounds. In those days the Teds listened to big band jazz and bought the noisiest, brassiest records by Stan Kenton and Ted Heath. Later, when Bill Haley & The Comets hit the world with ‘Rock Around The Clock’ in 1956, they would switch their allegiance to rock’n’roll.
Peter Grant spent his late teenage years ‘square bashing’ and undergoing basic army training. Although some found National Service frightening or plain boring, Peter seems to have enjoyed his time in the army and progressed well in the RAOC (Royal Army Ordinance Corps). He was promoted to the rank of Corporal and placed in charge of the dining hall. He used his theatrical experience to work as a stage manager for shows put on by the NAAFI, the service organisation that provided tea, buns and entertainment for the troops. He later claimed it was ‘a very cushy number’.
Many years later, when Peter was the rich and somewhat notorious manager of one of the world’s great rock groups, he took a brief nostalgic trip back to his army barracks. He was driving through the Midlands with his assistant Richard Cole and Atlantic Records executive Phil Carson. Recalls Richard: “We were near Kettering and he drove us into his old barracks in his brand new Rolls-Royce convertible. The soldier on duty saluted us and opened the gates. We drove all around this army camp and Peter showed us the huts where he used to live.”
His two years of National Service completed, Peter worked for a season in a holiday camp, an experience he would later succinctly describe as ‘dreadful’. He was also employed briefly as entertainments manager at a hotel in Jersey. For a while he dreamed of becoming an actor, but instead found himself back in London’s West End, working as a bouncer and doorman at the 2Is Coffee Bar at 59 Old Compton Street. This unpretentious café was soon to become the crucible of British skiffle and rock’n’ roll, where Tommy Steele, the first UK post-Elvis pop star was discov
ered. Young Harry Webb & The Drifters also played there, before they became Cliff Richard & The Shadows.
Many of the key figures in the first wave of the British rock’n’roll music industry got their start at the 2Is. Andrew Oldham, who later managed The Rolling Stones, used to sweep the floor there and Lionel Bart, later Britain’s most successful composer of hit musicals, painted murals on the basement wall. The waiter at the 2Is was Mickie Most, who went into partnership with Peter and became one of Britain’s top pop record producers. The coffee bar itself became part of pop culture and during an outside broadcast in November 1957 was used as the setting for the pioneering BBC TV pop show Six Five Special. It was also celebrated in the witty and satirical movie Expresso Bongo (1958), starring Cliff Richard and Laurence Harvey.
Coffee houses had been established in London way back in the days of Samuel Pepys and remained popular well into the 20th century. But it was in 1948 that British coffee drinking was revolutionised by the arrival of the chromium-plated Gaggia espresso machine. The first Soho coffee bar equipped with a Gaggia was the Moka Bar in Frith Street, in 1953. Henceforth coffee bars provided an attractive meeting place for teenagers, excluded from the ‘spit and sawdust’ pubs at a time when publicans were very strict about the over-18 entry policy. The 2Is was opened in 1956 by three Iranian-born brothers who originally owned the premises and called it the 3Is. When one of the brothers left, it was renamed the 2Is. Business wasn’t good and in April that year it was taken over by two Australian wrestlers, Paul Lincoln and Ray Hunter, who hoped to earn a steadier income from selling espresso than they could from wrestling. But they began losing money right from the start and matters were made worse when another coffee bar called Heaven And Hell opened right next door.
But change was in the air. In July 1956, during the annual Soho Fair, Wally Whyton, leader of The Vipers Skiffle Group, popped into the 2Is and asked if his group could play in the basement. The place was deserted and the desperate owners had nothing to lose, so they acquiesced, praying silently that ‘live’ music might bring in some customers. Their prayers were answered: the cellar bar was only 25 feet long and 16 feet wide, but soon it was packed with fans, jiving to The Vipers lively skiffle rhythms.
It wasn’t long before teenagers were queuing around the block to get in. Many of them fainted in the heat, but copious cups of coffee brought them round to hear the stars of the future like Adam Faith, Tommy Hicks, Emile Ford, Vince Taylor, Wee Willie Harris and Terry Dene. They also heard Mickie Most, who sometimes leapt up from behind the counter to sing a few numbers.
On the door, struggling with the crush of teenagers desperate to get an earful of this liberating music, was Peter Grant. He later recalled his time at the history making Soho cellar: “I had known Mickie Most since 1957. We used to work together at the 2Is. Mickie poured the coffee while I sold the tickets at the top of the stairs. You got a meal and ten shillings a night.” He must have insisted that pay and conditions be improved because he later claimed: “We got paid a quid per night and the guy who owned the place, Tom Littlewood, took ten per cent of our salary, which left us with eighteen bob (shillings).”
As the year went by, Mickie Most would play an increasingly important role in Peter’s life. Christened Michael Hayes, he was born in 1938, in Aldershot, Hampshire. He moved to Harrow in north London with his family and became friends with singer Terry Dene during the skiffle era. While Terry was becoming one of Britain’s first pop idols, Mickie was still operating the coffee machine at the 2Is while his mate Peter worked the door.
Paul Lincoln, the manager of the tiny cellar, began to take an interest in Mickie’s pal, the tough and confident giant from Battersea. Paul was still working as a wrestler and he decided the doorman at the 2Is was a perfect specimen for the professional wrestling game. Paul encouraged Peter to join him in a few bouts, to the delight of the punters. Weighing in at an estimated 23 stone, he was soon bouncing off the canvas, billed as ‘His Highness Count Bruno Alassio Of Milan’ or as ‘Count Massimo’. Some recall him being dubbed ‘The Masked Marauder’, the fighter who would take on anybody in the audience who was daft enough to volunteer.
Wrestling was hugely popular in Britain at the time and television coverage made stars of the top wrestlers. Sporting authorities, unimpressed by the stagy nature of the ‘grappling game’, frowned upon it from on high, describing it as “a pseudo-sport, a form of entertainment in which performers do muscular feats, using body contact and stunts, patterned on the skills of wrestling”. One rather pointed definition stated that: “For dramatic effect on the spectators, who believe they are observing a sports competition, the performance is likely to include expressions of anger, pain and helplessness.”* Nevertheless, it filled the hour on TV on Saturday afternoons immediately before the football results, grabbing the attention of men just back from the pub who required undemanding entertainment to fill in the time before the pubs reopened.
Peter’s wrestling experience would provide invaluable skills for his future career at the sharp end of the rock’n’roll business. Even so, he was rather anxious to forget those days, especially when he became a highly respected rock group manager. When his former exploits were revealed in a Daily Mirror article in 1971, it made him wary of giving interviews to newspapers. He later relented and would admit: “I was a wrestler for about 18 months when I needed some money.” This did not stop tabloid journalists forever harking back to his past and calling him a ‘giant’, ‘brute’ and a ‘devil’ – often in the same paragraph. He was once described as ‘looking like a bodyguard in a Turkish harem’. For his part, Peter would almost always refer to red-top tabloid newspapers as ‘the rags’.
Mickie Most casts new light on the beginnings of Peter’s wrestling career and explains: “We used to work together way back in the Fifties. We used to put up the wrestling rings for Dale Martin Promotions. Sometimes if a wrestler didn’t show up for the first bout, Peter used to do a bit of wrestling. He was a big guy and if the other wrestler was a bit small, then it would be what they called a ‘catch weight’, which is an odd weight. They used to throw each other all over the ring for a few minutes as the opening act. It didn’t happen a lot, but if Peter was available he’d have a go. I was a bit too skinny to have a go myself. They would have laughed if I’d come out in wrestling shorts. Peter was big even then, but in the early days he was in quite good condition. He wasn’t heavy from overeating. He was well built. I never heard him being called ‘Count Massimo’, but Paul Lincoln was known as ‘Doctor Death’ and these Australian guys worked the circuit around England. I often went with them to their shows. I’d jump on a train down to Southend and go with them to the venue and help out. That was the basis of Peter’s wrestling career. Peter was paid to put up the rings and take them down again. There’d be wrestling every Monday night at Wembley Town Hall and somebody had to put the ring up! I used to go to see wrestling there with Jet Harris. He loved it. When Peter butted someone with his stomach, that was just using a wrestling technique. Nobody ever got hurt. If they did get hurt it was an accident. It wasn’t meant to happen. There was no physical damage because it was all showbiz. It’s still big business in America, but nobody gets hurt.”
Around the same period, Peter took on another job as a doorman, this time at Murray’s Cabaret Club where he was the only man working amongst forty showgirls. “Being the doorman at Murray’s was good fun too. I wasn’t married then and what with me being the only man around and about forty girls on backstage, it was all right,” he said, diplomatically.
Less appealing was his brief stint acting as a minder for the notorious slum landlord Peter Rachman. Mickie Most explains this as the sort of work which was a matter of expediency rather than a chosen way of life. “It was the Fifties. Nobody had any money and everybody needed it. He was a dreamer and he hustled.”
Peter’s overriding ambition was still to get away from this kind of rough stuff and find work as a movie actor. He told Malcolm Dome in 1989: “I wan
ted to be an actor, but I was never really good enough, although I did get quite a lot of work in the Fifties and early Sixties. I used to ‘double’ for Robert Morley, even though they had to pad me out quite a bit and I also put on a bald wig. I had hair back then!”
Peter acted as a ‘double’ for Anthony Quinn in The Guns Of Navarone, the hit war movie of 1961. He worked briefly in a mime act and also appeared in several episodes of The Saint, a TV series starring Roger Moore. He once popped up as a barman, with all of two lines to recite. Grant’s children, Warren and Helen, would later fall about in hysterics whenever this episode was re-shown on TV. He also appeared in the popular BBC TV shows Crackerjack and Dixon Of Dock Green, and played a cowboy in The Benny Hill Show. In 1961 he had a small part as a Macedonian guard, clad in armour and make-up in Cleopatra, the movie starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
Cleopatra was made at Pinewood studios in England. However progress was slow as Liz Taylor was unable or unwilling to cope with the cold weather and kept walking off the set and returning to her hotel. This didn’t bother the Macedonian guard in his rubber outfit. He was being paid £15 a day and enjoying the easy money, although getting up at 6 a.m. every morning was not to his taste. Eventually filming was transferred to Egypt, a more authentic location, where it was considerably warmer. All the scenes that featured Peter were scrapped, so he didn’t appear in the final version, which in any case turned out to be an expensive flop. Peter also appeared as a sailor in A Night To Remember (1958), a better than average British version of the story of the sinking of The Titanic, starring Kenneth More. To Grant’s vast amusement, it was filmed not in the iceberg-infested Atlantic but in the murky depths of the Ruislip Lido.
