Secrets of Soho
Uncovering the seedy and salacious history of London’s most notorious quarter
Revealing the dark underbelly of London
The name Soho conjures images of peep shows, all-night drinking and a hive of radical alternative culture. The London area’s sensational reputation began in the 1920s when there were some 295 registered clubs within one mile of Piccadilly Circus. Scotland Yard’s Vice Squad even had a book listing the various venues through which officers could familiarise themselves with the less-salubrious nightspots. Over successive decades this number would only expand and the area would become a haven for bohemians, artists, members of the LGBT community and darker elements of society such as organised crime. Join us as we take a journey down the long-forgotten side streets of Soho’s past…
Where to begin? Well, perhaps with a bite to eat? And since the 1950s there’s only been one place in which to get a good, hearty (and cheap) meal: Chinatown. Soho’s Chinatown really began in the 1920s, when a small cluster of Chinese restaurants started to open in the area. Previously, the centre of the capital’s immigrant Chinese community had been in Limehouse, East London, which, despite having very little recorded crime soon developed a nefarious reputation thanks to works such as Sax Rohmer’s Fu Manchu novels. These books portrayed the area as full of opium dens, brothels and criminal masterminds. Following WWII, the immigrant population relocated first to Gerrard Street, Soho, where soon other non-culinary related businesses began to thrive. As historian Peter Speiser explains in Soho: The Heart of Bohemian London: “It was the communist takeover in 1949 that led to an influx of Chinese refugees into war-scarred Soho. They
"The brawl spilled into a greengrocer's and the owner's wife hit one of them over the head with a frying pan"
quickly established restaurants that were increasingly popular with theatre-goers, students looking for a cheap meal, and former British servicemen who had acquired a taste for Chinese food when serving in Asia.” Many of the immigrants developed their own names for the street, including ‘Tong Yahn’, which in Cantonese roughly translates as ‘Chinese People’s Street’, and the quarter itself was referred to as the ‘Imperial City’. In the 1970s businesses began to move to Wardour Street, where contemporary Chinatown can be found today.
Of course, in Soho one has to be careful of organised crime.
The Krays? Pah, move over. In Soho, Jack ‘Spot’ Comer was king. He often boasted that his nickname came from the fact that, if you were in trouble, he was always ‘on the spot’. More than likely, however, it referred to the large mole on his face. Born in 1913, Spot spent his childhood hanging around in gangs, and one event in particular had a large impact on the soon-to-be gangster. After a run-in with some rivals he was severely beaten but obtained revenge when he found the leader of the gang alone, pounding him to a pulp. “I discovered that I had to be patient to exact a full toll of vengeance,” Spot would later explain. “That fight taught me the desperation of being hounded and for the first time it taught me fear. Terrible, gibbering fear!”
Spot’s criminal career started small, collecting blood money for the ‘Stall Traders Fund Association’, created to stop new traders setting up stalls so old traders could get through the Depression. He then moved swiftly into working for the racetrack gangs, who were at this time one of the most vicious elements of the criminal underworld. Spot soon developed a calling card: dragging a razor down the side of a victim’s leg and around their buttocks so they feared sitting down lest the stitches tear open. His rise to power began post-war when he took on the infamous crime family, The Whites. First he forced them to give up control of Great Yarmouth
Racecourse, then in 1947 he assaulted a cousin of the family who’d mocked him for drinking only lemonade. The fight broke out in a lavatory and, in Spot’s own words: “Bump! Down into the piss he went.” Following this, Spot confronted Harry White himself and the resulting fight meant that the crime family lost respect and Spot was now the man to be feared. For nearly a decade, Spot and fellow gangster Billy Hill ran Soho, having some level of control over any criminal enterprise in the area. The result was that in this period Soho was relatively peaceful, with no gang wars or fights – that is until the two men’s uneasy alliance collapsed. After Hill sought to regain control of the racecourses Spot got into a fight with his right-hand man, Albert Dimes. The fight only ended when the brawl spilled into a greengrocer’s and the owner’s wife hit one of them over the head with a frying pan. Hill didn’t give up there, though, and sent Mad Frankie Fraser to slash Spot, who left Soho and the West End shortly after.
Anyway, enough talk of such things. Perhaps you would be interested in something a bit more bohemian in nature? In that case, we’ll have to visit The Colony Room Club, a grandiose den of debauchery that was a meeting place for Soho’s artists, writers and creatives for 60 years. Opening in 1948, it began primarily as a jazz bar, but those who ventured there did so because of its non-judgmental approach towards the clientele. Here, there was no need to hide and among the openly homosexual members was politician Tom Driberg, who often kept an eye out for a sailor in uniform. The Colony also proved popular due to it’s bypassing
of the strict laws regarding pub opening hours (11am-3pm, 6pm-11pm). The reasoning was that artists and writers didn’t keep a nine-to-five schedule, so the club couldn’t possibly be expected to follow these rules. Perhaps the best example would be the artist Francis Bacon, arguably the club’s most famous member. Bacon would start his day at 5am and work until 12pm before embarking upon a bender that began with drinks at The French House, lunch at Wheeler’s, more drinks at the Colony until 11pm and gambling until 2am, repeating the routine the next day. He was a Colony regular for four decades and it would become something of a second home for him.
Colony members became a tight-knit community and, as one regular, artist Darren Coffield, remembered: “The Colony was not just a bar, but also an artistic support centre, psychiatrist’s couch, local post office (members left notes and letters to one another behind the bar), unemployment bureau and marriage guidance centre. (‘It will all end in tears, dear.’)”
So who was the owner who managed to control this riotous group of bohemians? That would be one Muriel Belcher, who the Australian comedian Barry Humphries (better known as Dame Edna Everage) once described as an “ogress” and her barman
Ian Board as a “malevolent elf”. Coffield remembered Board as ruling “the club with a rod of iron, like a cross-between Oscar Wilde and Hitler” before recalling fondly that Board would always ask, “How’s your handbag, dear?”, ensuring the young man had enough money for a taxi home. Belcher was something of a Soho character, with a notorious reputation. Described as having a “strong Sephardic profile reminiscent of a hawk” and a “benevolent witch”, Belcher also had a distinct habit of referring to her regular male customers as her ‘daughters’. Indeed, many visitors would refer to the club as ‘Muriel’s’ after its owner the “charismatic bisexual from Birmingham”. Among those who passed through the Colony’s doors were Noël Coward, Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Laughton, Damien Hirst and Tom Baker.
Perhaps we’d best lay off the stronger stuff for now, and instead visit one of the espresso bars that caused something of a cultural revolution in the 1950s. The first such place, Moka
Bar, opened in the summer of 1952 on Frith Street. Its intention was to demonstrate the Gaggia espresso machine for potential buyers, but the bar itself was so popular that by 1960 there were estimated to be some 500 similar establishments all over London. These cafes were a hive of youth subculture, none more so than the 2i’s Coffee Bar on Old Compton Street, which claimed to be the birthplace of British rock’n’roll. Underneath the main cafe was a basement where young wannabe teenage rock stars would play
to the masses, two of which would go on to become Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. Each coffee bar was unique in its own way, as Dr Matthew Partington explains in his paper on the subject: “The majority of the coffee bars were independent (rather than a chain of premises) and they not only looked different from one another but their owners actively sought to make them look different so that they would be remembered from a multitude of others.” Perhaps one of the most bizarre was Le Macabre, operating on Meard Street throughout the 1960s and into the 1970s. Taking its gothic theming intensely seriously, the tables were coffins, ashtrays were skulls made out of Bakelite, and the jukebox played songs exclusively on the subject of death. Today you can still visit another famous Soho coffee house, Bar Italia, which although not as influential as Moka Bar actually predates it by some seven years and may be London’s oldest Italian coffee house.
What’s that? You think you’ve spotted somebody you know? Somebody famous? Well, we’d hardly be surprised. Throughout its history Soho, as well as being home to eccentrics, artists and the odd villain or two, has teemed with celebrities. In the 1700s Chevalier d’eon, the infamous swordsperson, diplomat and spy who defied cultural norms and changed their gender, lived at 38 Brewer Street. Some decades after d’eon’s death in 1810, the aftermath of the 1848 revolutions caused many political exiles to seek refuge in Britain, including a young journalist and philosopher by the name of Karl Marx, who lived on Dean Street from 1851 to 1856. Both d’eon and Marx have illustrious company: William Blake, Casanova, Mozart, John Logie Baird and Mary Seacole all lived in the area at some point.
Even those who were unfortunate (or perhaps that should be fortunate?) not to live in Soho seem to have been inspired by its atmosphere and colourful characters. As well as the aforementioned writers who frequented the Colony club, Virginia Woolf regularly purchased “flawed slightly” silk stockings at Berwick Street Market and described Soho as a menacing place filled with “fierce” light and “raw” voices. She wasn’t alone in her shopping habits either, as famous TV chef Fanny Cradock used to buy exotic ingredients there. Numerous influential musicians also thrived in Soho, including David Bowie, whose first band, Dave Jones And The King Bees, played in The Jack Of Clubs (soon to be Madame Jojo’s) in 1964 in what would be his big break.
Whereas some sought fame and fortune, others were attracted to Soho for the discretion it offered. The area served as a safe haven for LGBT individuals, in particular gay men, who in the years prior to the decriminalisation of homosexuality in 1967 found themselves continuously persecuted, despite the findings of the 1957 Wolfenden Report that recommended homosexuality should no longer be a criminal offence. In the 1930s Soho was home to the Caravan Club, which catered for the LGBT community but soon attracted unwanted attention. In 1934 it was the site of a police raid that led to some 103 individuals being arrested. One in particular, Cyril De Leon, bravely confronted the officer in charge and said: “Well, I don’t mind this beastly raid but I would like to know if you can let me have one of your nice boys to come home with. I really am good”. In the 1960s and 1970s there were clubs such as the Careless Stork and the Festival, which operated as lesbian bars, and the Duce and the Alphabet, which were for homosexual men. Homosexuals at this time often spoke Polari, a slang that allowed them to openly express themselves without fear of persecution.
Of course no trip down Soho’s seedy side streets would be complete without some, shall we say, titillating entertainment
and a visit to one of Paul Raymond’s establishments. In the
1960s and 1970s Raymond was the uncrowned king of Soho’s adult entertainment industry, owning numerous clubs, the most famous and notorious of which was the Raymond Revuebar. The Revuebar was inspired by the Windmill Theatre, which during World War II had hosted a form of cabaret known as Revudeville, combining ‘revue’ (variety theatre) and ‘nudity’ and whose players included noted actor Kenneth Moore.
It was Raymond, however, who in the 1950s and 1960s turned sex-based cabaret into a Soho institution. Raymond was born in 1925 to a family with a strong Catholic ideology, and attended a strict boys’ school. After leaving school he first got a taste for showbusiness working as a drummer at the Grand Pavilion in Withernsea. He was finally drawn to Soho, where he quickly gained a reputation as a ‘fiddler’, an early name for what would become known as a ‘spiv’ (petty criminal). Following a brief lapse in fortune, he found success operating a touring vaudeville show. His genius was in circumventing laws prohibiting nude dancing by having his models simply stand motionless. It was with the profits from this that, in 1957, he was able to set up the Raymond Revuebar. Speaking of the entertainment on offer, a 1966 Time magazine article described one of the Revuebar’s act as follows: “An Australian blonde named Rita Elen gets knocked about by a hirsute rich man’s Johnny Weissmuller with a whip whilst she does an exotic dance with a fully grown live cheetah.” Despite the law criminalising homosexual acts, the Revuebar offered a Sunday night programme aimed specifically towards gay men.
Naturally, the entertainment on offer at the Raymond Revuebar caused controversy and in 1961 Raymond was fined £5,000 by the chairman of the London Sessions, who called the bar’s shows “filthy, disgusting and beastly”. The resulting publicity kept the bar in operation and Raymond quickly recouped his £5,000. Capitalising on the club’s success, he opened more strip clubs and a variety of pornographic magazines including Club International, Mayfair and Men Only. Today, the spot where the Revuebar once stood is occupied by The Box Soho, an establishment which continues its predecessor’s legacy by offering a regular evening cabaret of salacious entertainment.
Well, we hope you’ve enjoyed our little tour of a long-gone
Soho, an area now ravaged by time and gentrification. The history of this quarter is as colourful and decadent as some of its inhabitants, and there are many other infamous establishments we didn’t have time to visit. For example, we could have popped into Regent Street’s The Eve Club, which played host to Frank Sinatra, Errol Flynn and a host of government ministers during the 1960s. Or we could have had a cup at the Heaven & Hell Coffee House, which boasted a downstairs level that could only be reached by entering through the mouth of a giant devil. Rest assured, however, that while many of these venues have faded into obscurity, the memory of them lives on and Soho’s bohemian spirit will never die.
"Raymond's genius was in circumventing laws prohibiting nude dancing by having his models simply stand motionless"