The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
Down and out in the Coach and Horses
Lewis Jones admires this portrait of the lost world of bohemian Soho and its ‘menagerie of monsters’
To London media types of a certain age, the phrase “Soho in the Eighties” evokes memories of the Groucho Club, that gimcrack monument to fiddled expenses and cocaine-free cocaine. This is emphatically not the Soho recalled by Christopher Howse, which was much more properly bohemian. As he explains in its foreword, his new book is a sequel to Daniel Farson’s Soho in the Fifties, published in 1987, and it features many of the same places and characters.
Howse gives scholarly accounts of Soho’s history and architecture, and writes lyrically of its independent shops, such as the Italian delicatessen I Camisa on Old Compton Street, and the elaborately named Brewer Street butcher Slater & Cooke, Bisney & Jones, “where beef with flocculent fat hung above a wooden block where a man dressed in an apron attacked it”. But his focus is on its “radically democratic” pubs and drinking clubs, where “poets, painters, stagehands, retired prostitutes, actors, criminals, musicians and general layabouts met to drink and converse, or shout at each other”.
Chief among these pubs were the Coach and Horses on Greek Street, and the York Minster, known as the French Pub, on
Dean Street. On an early visit to the former, Howse bought a pint of beer which did not look or taste right, and politely drew it to the attention of Norman
Balon, whom the journalist Jeffrey Bernard dubbed “London’s Rudest Landlord”. “If you don’t like it, you can f--- off,” said Balon. “Here’s your 73p.” Charmed by this, Howse became an habitué, and often featured, with his luxuriant beard, in The Regulars, Michael Heath’s cartoon strip in Private Eye.
Rudeness was a sort of cult among this “menagerie of monsters”. Bernard liked to ask people, “Do you know what the worst thing about you is?” Jenny Mulherin, an Antipodean publisher, once told Bernard, “Your brothers are better than you. Bruce [the photographer] and Oliver [the poet]. Both of them.” (This was true.) “In that case,” he replied, “don’t f------ speak to me, then. Do you want me to hit you in the face?”
An exception was Gaston Berlemont, the landlord of the French, who was always impeccably courteous. If a woman was too drunk, he would say, “Madame, I look forward to seeing you again – tomorrow.”
But Ian Board, who ran the Colony Room Club on Dean Street, was spectacularly rude even by local standards, as was Daniel “Fatty” Farson, who would begin a drinking session quite affably but then suddenly turn nasty, “spitting froth, his cheeks blotched like some scarlet aurora borealis”.
Sometimes they would fight, and their shouts would “coalesce into a melee of cries, as though two pigs had got stuck in a narrow metal gateway”: “‘No one likes coming here any more. It’s so dull. I despise you.’ Look at yerself, you ’orrible blob… Tedious… F-----idiot… Detestable… Dyed hair… Failure… Dreary old c---…”
At one point Howse selfdeprecatingly concedes that “if you don’t know any of these people, it won’t mean anything”. Some were so well known for this not to matter: the actor John Hurt, for example, or the painter Francis Bacon, who once declared, “I wouldn’t like living in the country, because of all the horrible little apple trees there.”
And in any case Howse is, as one would expect from a former obituaries editor of this paper, such a deft sketcher of people that we feel as if we do know them. Of the poet Paul Potts, for example, he notes, “The principal enemies of Potts’s popularity were his constant cadging of drinks and money, his theft of friends’ books and shirts, his wounding outbursts of verbal abuse and, later, his strong and offensive smell.”
“It was all very funny indeed,” he writes, and it still is, if you find that sort of thing funny. Graham Mason, the manager of a picture library, was known as “the drunkest man in the Coach and Horses”. Seated at the bar, he would turn to strangers behind him who were trying to get served and snarl, “Who the f--- are you?” On one occasion this prompted a strong blow to his head, which sent him and his stool flying. “Painfully clawing himself upright, he set the stool in its place, reseated himself, and, twisting his head round again, growled: ‘Don’t you ever do that again’.”
It was also all very sad indeed. The fun had a desperate air, and frequently ended in “divorce, sickness, poverty and death”. As readers of his column Sacred Mysteries will know, Howse is an acute moralist. Amid the squalor and bile of old Soho, “it seemed to me that a disregard for money and conventional success proved a more challenging school of virtue”. Perhaps so. What a betrayal, then, that Farson and Jeffrey Bernard should both have ended up in the Groucho.
288pp, Bloomsbury, £20 Daniel ‘Fatty’ Farson would spit froth, ‘his cheeks blotched like a scarlet aurora borealis’ Call 0844 871 1514 to order a copy from the Telegraph for £16.99