Craig Brown
The Colony: a club for wits or just sozzled old twits?
There is something timeless about bars crammed with heavy drinkers. ‘They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautifully drunk, and leering drunk, and secretive drunk, and dignified drunk, and admittedly drunk, and fighting drunk, and even rolling drunk.’
This is how the great novelist of drunkenness, Patrick Hamilton, chose to describe a London dive, The Midnight Bell, nearly 100 years ago, back in 1929.
That passage reminds me strongly of Soho’s Colony Room Club, which opened 20 years later, in 1948, and went on for 60 years, eventually closing in 2008, having served its purpose.
Its principal attraction was that it was open in the afternoons, when ordinary pubs were obliged to close. This meant that seasoned drinkers, already tanked up after lunchtime drinking elsewhere in Soho, could stumble along Dean Street, through a grubby entrance, up a narrow staircase and into the cramped, smoke-filled room that was the Colony.
It was an interesting and alluring place, though neither so interesting nor so alluring as the author of this beautifully produced elegy suggests.
In his foreword, Barry Humphries remembers it from his youth as ‘a wonderful discovery’. For him, ‘it provided an atmosphere of delectable depravity for the select company of alcoholics and would-be artists’. It was run by a razor-tongued woman called Muriel Belcher and her assistant Ian Board, who took over when she died. ‘What did that ogress and her malevolent elf Ian use to entice us to that infernal club?’ asks Humphries. ‘As she grew even uglier and he transformed from lah-de-dah rent boy to a booze-bitten queen with a strawberry nose, we still climbed those fateful stairs.’
Humphries ascribes the attraction of the Colony Room to ‘The Slate’. ‘No one paid. It was the alcoholics’ paradise. You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they arrived at the astronomical total, and alkies like to pay more anyway.’
Was the Colony Room really any different from any other drinking den, in Manchester, or Dublin, or Chicago, or from the pages of Patrick Hamilton? The author, Darren Coffield, a one-time habitué, thinks it was. To support his case, he has dug up lost interviews and produced a long – frankly, overlong – oral history, in which a variety of regulars, many now dead, ramble on about its particular appeal.
‘There were no ordinary people there, only extraordinary people,’ states one regular, while another rattles on about how ‘the conversation was so vital and witty’.
Alas, alcohol is the enemy of memory, and though many old members airily expound on the club as a hub of wit and vitality, the examples they have to offer are notably thin on the ground.
One regular maintains that the club’s