Lunch with Pete Waterman
In anticipation of this year’s alas now-cancelled Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally, Tim Coghlan took music legend Pete Waterman OBE – who was due to open the event – to lunch at London’s oldest, and probably best French restaurant – Mon Plaisir in Cove
I FIRST came across Mon Plaisir through a chance conversation in 2015 with the IWA stalwart, Roger Squires, who told me that it was the favourite restaurant of Robert Aickman, co-founder of the IWA in 1946.
As Aickman was a renowned bon viveur and here he had also entertained his lady friends, it was a ringing endorsement. And more to the point, the restaurant was still there, and still as good. Also that Aickman’s favourite corner table was still there, where Roger had sat on each of the two occasions in the early 1970s, when he had dined with him. We had to make a meal of it.
Since then it has become my favourite London watering hole where, among others, I have met up with celebrities who have been kind enough to agree to open our rallies. And I have got to know the restaurant’s elegant front-of-house assistant manageress, Marilene le Floch, whose grandfather was a boatman on the River Loire, and whose story I have earlier recounted in Towpath Talk. Marilene has been working at the restaurant since 1988, and during the few years I have now been going there, has always looked after me.
This year my guest was music legend Pete Waterman OBE. I had met him for the first time in early October 2019, when he came to Braunston Marina to film scenes for the Grand Union and Oxford Canal episodes of Celebrity Britain by Barge: Then and Now, in which I was interviewed by him.
I had learnt during the filming – in our chats before, and between shootings – that Pete was no newcomer to the canals, although before making this film he had never been canal boating. He had been born in central Coventry within a few hundred yards of the Coventry Canal.
He had played on the towpath with the boatmen’s kids, some of whom came to his school, which was near the canal, for short visits when their parents were tied up, waiting for orders or loading at nearby Longford, and the like. He had known Braunston as a boy in the mid-1950s, when he came fishing in the reservoirs here with his father, when it was still a working yard, with canal carrying now in its twilight years.
I showed Pete our last shop-copy of Sonia Rolt’s A Canal People. The photographs of Robert Longden. It is an amazing collection of photographs taken around Hawkesbury Junction, Coventry, in the late 1940s-early 1950s, and literally saved from a garden shed by Sonia.
It was first published in 1997, and launched by Sonia at that year’s Braunston Boat Show. Pete said he remembered Hawkesbury Junction as being just like that, and insisted on buying the book, despite my offer to give it to him. When we met again, he told me the book was now by his bedside, and he looked at it almost every night at home, bringing back many happy memories of childhood around 70 years ago.
At that Braunston filming, Pete had agreed to come and open the 2020 Braunston Historic Narrowboat Rally – and now we were meeting up in part to plan his role. The lunch would also give me a good chance to find out more about his early days on the canals, and with it, his return to the waterways through the filming of that programme. His amazing rise from a redundant 16-year-old steam locomotive fireman to a legend in the music world is well known, but his Coventry-canal boyhood was still something of a little-known backwater of his early life.
I had suggested to Pete that we met at noon on a Tuesday in mid-January, when the restaurant should be quiet, and we could talk with little disturbance. This he agreed to. He hinted that he already knew the restaurant. I had already heard of his punctiliousness with appointments, and was determined not to be late, leaving a hour to spare, to be spent around the corner in Stanford’s bookshop, with its wonderful collection of travel books – including Terry Dallington’s great waterways books, Narrow Dog To…, and its in-house coffee bar where you can dip into your literary purchases.
I arrived with a good 10 minutes to spare, but Pete was already there. The restaurant did not open until 12, so instead we sat on the Gauloises-friendly bench outside, and talked about the filming. He told me: “You came across very well. And what a beautiful day to film the marina. I was doing the voice-overs only yesterday.” At 12 on the dot we were let in by a waitress. Marilene, we were told, was busy upstairs, but our table was ready for us, and she would join us later.
Having taken our places, Pete said he was doing a Dry January. I suggested instead a bottle of Perrier Water, which for some time now the restaurant appeared to have been Britain’s last outpost of this once fashionable sparkling mineral water, since the scandal all those years ago. I told Pete that like Inspector Morse, I needed a drink to think, and would settle for a half carafe of the house-Loire wine. With Marilene’s Loire connections, it was always excellent.
We reviewed the menu. We both opted for the traditional French onion soup, for which the restaurant has a legendary reputation – probably the best this side of Paris. Then to follow, Pete chose the moules marinière starter as a main course. I knew them of old and so went for the more exotic scallops and gambas flambéed in patis, with Jerusalem artichoke and butternut squash purée. It had all the makings of a memorable French meal.
It was now time to talk to Peter about those Coventry canal days. He was born a post-war baby boomer in January 1947 – although he told me he was actually born dead. He was brought to life by the midwife with a sip of Martell brandy, for which, once he came to man’s estate, he has since maintained a lifelong passion. He even once made a pilgrimage to the distillery in Cognac with the excuse of thanking them for saving his life.
His parents lived with his grandfather at 94 Burlington Road, a house his grandfather owned before the war, and in which his father was brought up.
Pete rather liked the grand-sounding street name, and referred to himself as a ‘Burlington Bertie’. But it was a workingclass area, and Pete refers to his origins as working class, though the house was probably the best one around, being much larger and end of terrace – in fact semi-detached with a modestly sizeable front garden.
Before the war, as a young man Pete’s father was an engineering fitter with Armstrong Whitworth, as it was then called. He married the day the Second World War was declared on September 3, 1939, and signed up the very next day. As an aircraft engineer, he should have been in a reserved occupation, but he somehow got round this.
Amazingly he was drafted into the Household Cavalry in 1940, which was still a mounted regiment doing ceremonial duties, with a mounted detachment in Palestine. He was only there for a short time, before he was transferred in 1941 into what became in 1942 the REME (Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers), whose main task was ‘repairing the technical equipment of all arms’.
Here he served for the remainder of the war, through Italy, northern France and into Germany, during which time he
never saw his wife. Like his father in the First World War, he suffered from shellshock, which he got over, but which brought on dementia much later in life. Pete knew little about what his father had done in the war, until a BBC Radio 2 programme was made of Pete’s life, and a skilled researcher found out about his father’s Second World War service and that of his two grandfathers in the First World War.
After the war, Pete’s father returned to Burlington Road, where he soon found work as an aircraft engineer with his old company, specialising in the leading edges of aircraft – wings, propellers and such. “My dad had a particular talent for this.” He first worked at an aerodrome north of Coventry, and was then seconded to work with the great Frank Whittle in the development of the front wings for the new jet engines at their works at Lutterworth, some distance north east of Coventry. For both jobs, he was picked up early each morning on the main street round the corner from his house by a works bus, which returned him each night. “Few people of our class had cars, and that’s how they went to work in those days.”
The one thing Pete did know about his father’s war service was that through the REME, he was trained to drive trucks and obtained his commercial licence. When, in about 1954-5, his father decided to use his improved living standards to have ‘more freedom to get about’, he was able to obtain a car licence without taking a test – something which at first rather surprised him. But with that, he was able to go out and buy a 1938 Austin 8, “for 16 quid. I remember the registration number – EWD 341”.
The purchase was to change their lives. “My dad was a big coarse fisherman – loved it!” He was now able to venture further afield into open country to indulge his passion for this, which previously had been restricted to the rather filthy urban canals around Coventry. And the young Pete enthusiastically joined him.
His father had to work Saturday mornings, but was home by three. Then they were off for whatever daylight remained. But Sunday was the big day. After attending the early morning church service, they went out into open country for the whole day, south eastward to the Oxford and Grand Union Canals.
They especially liked the Napton Canal Reservoir, in its then wild and open-country setting, and it was here that Pete caught his first large carp – “a big one. I got bored, you do when you’re a kid, and I used a bit of my egg sandwich as bait, and it worked. Later I put the fish back. We always put everything back. But the boatmen liked to eat them.” I asked him if he had been photographed by his father with that fish. He replied: “We didn’t have the money to have a camera and take photographs. I have no photographs of my childhood.”
Pete returned to that reservoir to film a scene for Celebrity Britain by Barge, where he talked about his childhood fishing. As he reminisced, he succeeded in breaking the reservoir paddle-gear for letting water out into the canal above Calcutt Locks, – much to the annoyance of the producer, who then walked out.
But the clip survived into what was broadcast – with Peter looking like a naughty schoolboy who was highly amused by the incident.
Another favourite for father and son was the ‘First Reservoir’ at what is today Braunston Marina, which also had to appear in the film. The reservoir was not then connected to the canal via the marina, as it is today, leaving the waters “quite undisturbed. The basin was full of quite big carp, and that’s why we went there. We used to fish all along it. The yard was then quite run down. One man’s problem can be the fisherman’s friend. Too many boats and the fish won’t settle, whereas the occasional boat turns up the silt and feeds the fish”.
While wooden narrowboat building was still continuing on a small scale in the mid-1950s, Pete has no recollection of seeing this – but his visits were on Sundays. However he did recollect seeing the working narrowboats still going by on the Grand Union Canal outside the then Barlows Yard – the boatmen still worked seven days a week to keep their fragile way of life going.
Pete was also able to enjoy his early interest in trains, with the branch line from Weedon to Leamington still open and with it the small Braunston station perched on the hill above the yard: “It was a double whammy for me. You used to see the occasional steam train still going along the back there.” Pete had already formed the desire to become a footplate man, working on steam engines. He was later to leave his secondary modern school at the earliest age possible, which he did at 14. “I just wasn’t interested in education.”
With his canal childhood now in the can, and having learnt that Pete had not narrowboated before, I asked him how he got on with it in the filming. It produced a surprising answer. Thanks to the Second World War Idle Women, he told me he proved something of a natural. I was somewhat taken aback by his reply. Then he explained in 1986, he had been driving in his car somewhere and heard on BBC Radio 4’s Women’s Hour about the republication of Susan Woolfitt’s Idle Women. It was first published highly successfully in 1947, and gave rise to that name being given to the handful of young female volunteers who had worked the canals during the war – the condescending term was unknown to most of them until that book was first published. Susan Woolfitt was still alive then and talked to the presenter about her wartime experiences, as well as reading a few choice extracts from the book.
Pete was amazed and went and bought a copy and read it as soon as he could. Now fascinated by these women, he read all the extant books by the Idle Women, and having decided that Woolfitt’s book was the best by far, he reread that again. “When I was asked to do this Britain by barge gig, I said I would only do it if the Idle Women were brought into it. And once this had been agreed, I signed up. Then I read Idle Women for the third time.
“Because the descriptions of how to handle a fully laden pair of working narrowboats were so good, I already knew what to do before going near one. When we had training by the hire-boat company near Bradford, before the first episode, I told the man not to bother with me, but to go and teach Bill Oddie. Then we went into the first lock and I did it perfectly. He said to me, ‘I see now, you’ve done this before.’ No, I said, never driven a narrowboat in my life, but I’ve read Susan Woolfitt three times. The man looked at me in amazement – he hadn’t even heard of the Idle Women, let alone Susan Woolfitt.”
The experience left Pete with a new peak to climb. “Once you’ve got used to it, a hire-boat is quite easy to manage. What I now wanted to do was to steer a pair of fully laden working narrowboats, and bring them into a lock without hitting anything – just like Susan Wolfitt.”
I told him it could be easily arranged at the rally, and he could invite Kylie Minogue to steer his butty – like a working boatmen husband and wife team. Pete had had first-hand experience of co-writing her songs and producing her records. “No, not Kylie. No! No! No! Besides you couldn’t afford her. She charges a hundred grand just to get out of bed!”
True to the producer’s word, episode one of the two-part Grand Union – Oxford Canal run, featured the Idle Women on the quartet’s visit to Stoke Bruene. There was an interview with Kathryn Dodington, who lives in a canalside cottage and whose aunt Daphne Marsh was largely responsible for starting the Idle Women with Kitty Gayford in 1942. Also interviewed was Lorna Yorke, a museum volunteer, who is descended from a boatmen family and talked about the boatmen’s Florence Nightingale, who had also attended to the Idle Women. And on parade was the museum’s
– probably the best surviving Grand Union Canal Carrying Company narrowboat in Second World War livery. The boat was co-steered by museum volunteer Stephanie Furniss and Anne Diamond on a run up to the entrance to Blisworth Tunnel. And throughout that piece were an amazing collection of Second World War newsreels and photographs of the Idle Women. Pete had got his pennyworth.
We were now joined by the restaurant’s Marilene who, draped in a fine silk scarf, carried all the elegance of having come from shopping in Paris’s Rue Royale. She and Pete immediately recognised each other. It soon emerged that in the 1980s Pete had used the restaurant as his office canteen – his offices were just around the corner, as was the rest of the London music world, with ‘Tinpan Alley’ – Denmark Street – and Wardour Street little more than a few hundred yards away. “You used to come here with Elaine Page and Tim Rice,” Marilene exclaimed.
She asked me if I would take a photograph of her with Pete for the restaurant’s webpage, which I did, with Pete’s approval. It is now there in their Hall of Fame for all to see. Then thanks to Marilene, a waitress arrived with a complimentary glass of the house champagne, which induced Pete to give up on Dry January.
This ‘in vino veritas’ inspired Pete to become reflective: “Tim Rice is extraordinary. His lyrics are brilliant. He is probably the most underrated lyricist of our time. He was completely overshadowed by Andrew, whom I thought was very good, but not in the same league. It was the same with Paul and John. Paul was the genius. Sergeant Pepper was really all him. He was a perfectionist.
“I remember once being with them with Paul insisting on making 32 takes of a song before he was happy with it. It drove John mad. He had been perfectly happy with the first take.” For a humble canal marina operator like myself, this was all another world.
Pete suddenly noticed the time. He had to go or he would be late for an appointment in Ealing. I was in no hurry to leave, and instead ordered another coffee, to accompany my writing up of my notes. Then I thought I would also have a glass of Martel brandy – after all it had once saved Pete’s life. And I needed a drink to think…