Authors: Victor Gregg
We went prepared for the worst, but, instead of the dreaded cane, Mr Thornton told us to sit down and to listen carefully to what he was about to say. It went something like this. ‘I suppose you two consider yourselves unbeatable? The pair of you strutting around like a couple of champion fighting cocks. You’re both nearly thirteen years old and in a year’s time you’ll leave school and be out on the streets trying to earn a living. If you carry on the way you are now you will both spend most of your lives behind bars. As for you, Victor Gregg, I really thought you had something better in you. And you, young Tommy, what do you want out of life, just one fight after another? Is that all you’re good for? I think you can do better for yourselves. I want you both off the streets and into the grammar school. It’s the only chance you’ll have so get stuck in and make something of yourselves.’ With that he dismissed us. We learnt later that our Mr Thornton and the Bear had talked about us and, much to the Bear’s satisfaction, Mr Thornton had decided to lay down the law to us.
The amazing outcome was that, almost overnight, Tommy Spires left the gang and ended up at the grammar school in Great College Street. As for me, I knew that I could do better, but I was torn between that and wanting to be with the lads in Wakefield Street.
21
My years at Cromer Street School ended when I turned fourteen, at which point I presented myself to the local labour exchange in Penton Street, at the top of Pentonville Road.
The next week, straight out of school and now in a good pair of second-hand long trousers, I started working for an optical firm just off Rosebery Avenue, on the second floor of an industrial building at the corner of Exmouth Street Market. The firm was called F. G. Optical Company, the F. G. standing for Fritz Gua. The company was a specialist manufacturer of spectacle frames and nearly all the work was carried out by scruffy boys just out of school. Boys like me in other words. Fritz’s partner was a Welshman by the name of Lewis, who handled relations with the small workforce. The work was just a means of making a wage in order to have money in your pocket. We earned ten shillings a week, standard for a youngster at the time, half of which I gave to my mum; the remaining five shillings was all mine to spend on clothes, mostly second-hand, and anything else that took my fancy. Paid on Friday and skint by Sunday night, if not before, that was the norm.
I was given the job of operating one of the milling machines that turned out the frames. Oblong pieces of thick plastic were piled up on the bench in the morning. The boys employed in milling had to put a piece of this plastic into a jig and then we milled it out on a cutting wheel which whizzed around at thousands of revs per minute, just a bare cutter protruding from a hole in the bench with no protection of any kind. There was a constant depletion of the workforce due to the regular cutting off of fingers. The Royal Free Hospital in Gray’s Inn Road knew the firm well. The factory inspectors used to turn a blind eye and I often wondered if they were being bribed to stay away.
Work started at eight o’clock, with a ten-minute break at ten thirty, then half an hour for dinner for which the firm provided the tea. We ate whatever our mums had provided in the way of sandwiches. Then the final slog until the whistle blew at five thirty. When a mishap occurred such as a finger being cut off, the cry would go out: ‘BLOOD UP’. Then, while the victim was whisked away to hospital, one of us was detailed to wash the blood off the wall, and cover it with liberal amounts of distemper to hide the stain. The only employees who were over sixteen or seventeen were the man who cut out the blocks of plastic on a huge bandsaw and the girls who worked in the polishing shop. There were also some men – we were told they were Germans – who worked in a separate room fixing the side pieces to the frames. By the time the boys were old enough to ask for more money they were sacked and a fresh bunch of recruits taken on.
It was during a slack period that Mr Lewis asked me to take a bucket and some polishing kit and go down to the local garage to wash his car, a big American Buick. The garage was the home of the Mount Pleasant Taxi Company. It was run by the son of old man Levy (a well-known character on the London cab scene) who owned Levy’s of King’s Cross, the parent company, and it was the major taxi firm of the day. This was quite exciting. I used to polish the Buick and then polish it again. Unbeknown to the boss I learnt to drive it around the garage to the amusement of the fitters and cleaners who worked there.
One fine day old man Levy’s son came up and asked me if I could ‘find the time to wash down a couple of his cars’. ‘Not ’arf?,?’ says I, thinking, of course, of the extra money. Tom Levy had a couple of MGs with which he competed at Brooklands, in Surrey, and sometimes Donington, in the Midlands, and it was these cars that he wanted me to keep ‘nice and shiny’.
I gave my first job the boot. I had been at it for just eight weeks. My new job as a taxi cleaner at Levy’s of Mount Pleasant paid an extra five shillings a week with much better conditions and without the threat of losing my fingers. It was when Tom Levy started taking me to Brooklands that life began to get interesting. It was there that I met all the famous racing drivers of the day, men like Freddie Dixon who used to drive for Riley, Tom Birkett, another character, and last but not least Earl Howe, whose most famous car was a huge Napier Railton. It was an unforgettable experience watching this giant of a car lapping the bumpy surface of the Brooklands oval at speeds of over a hundred miles an hour. Tom Levy’s team used an old flat-bed lorry to transport whatever car was to compete, along with the ramps, spare parts, ropes, petrol and oil. As far as I can recall there were four of us. Tom, of course, was lord and master, then there was the chief fitter, his mate and, at the bottom of the heap, yours truly.
My first job, once the car had been manhandled off the lorry, was to get the polishing cloth going. After the first few trips I was trusted to check the tyres, oil and the chassis, to make certain that all the bolts were secured with split pins. All four of us had specific jobs. Whether the fitter and his mate ever got paid for what they were doing I haven’t a clue. I only know that I never was, although I used to get small sums of cash for the little jobs I did for some of the other drivers. I tended to do the jobs nobody else wanted to do, like getting underneath the car to drain the hot oil, while at the same time scorching my clothes on the red-hot exhaust pipe.
In those days it only needed one nut to come adrift to cause a crash and, with no safety devices, like seat belts, a crash at Brooklands usually meant a stretcher job to the nearest mortuary. Luckily that never happened to us.
As far as I know Tom Levy never won much because his two MGs were the smallest of the MG marque so his only chance of a prize was in a handicap event. The MGs were only about 1100cc, unlike the Maseratis and the more modern English Racing Automobiles, or ERAs. ERA was a company formed by Humphrey Cook and Raymond Mays. Cook was the man with the money; his family ran a big firm of drapers. They wanted to design and build cars that could compete with the likes of Bugatti and Talbot. They were quite successful. Going back to Tom Levy, I suppose his vehicles were similar to the Austin Sevens and the Riley Nines, which was the well-respected car with which Freddie Dixon used to rule the roost. His main competitors were people like George Eyston and a Siamese driver of some fame, Prince Bira. All the bigger cars like the Talbots, the Alfas and, of course, the mighty Napier Railton charged around the infamous bumpy concrete bowl at breakneck speeds but it was always the Napier with John Cobb sitting dead upright at the wheel that won. If this mighty Goliath of a car hit a bump at a hundred miles an hour all four wheels took to the air. The crescendo of noise as they approached was tremendous, and then, as quick as a flash, they would disappear round the banking, leaving the strong and unmistakable smell of castor oil floating on the air. There was nothing like it. I became a sort of errand boy and general dogsbody at these meetings. ‘Hey, Levy, where’s that kid of yours?’ was the signal for me to give a hand and get smothered in oil and grease – I loved it. To be given a ride around the track in some of the bigger cars, along with instructions to pump the oil whenever the pressure needle dropped below a certain figure, was a dream straight from heaven. A pair of overalls, smothered in grease and dirt and supplied by the boss, plus a black beret from one of the drivers – that was my uniform.
The first job when we got back to the garage was to lift the engine out of the chassis and set it up on a workbench ready for the fitter to get to work on it before the next meeting. This meant a complete strip down. Everything that moved either in a circle or up and down had to be cleaned, weighed and polished. The flywheel went to the engineering shop to be skimmed and balanced. This meant shaving metal off the wheel and it was not unusual to skim as much as half an inch off its width. The finishing touch would be a polish job. The same attention was paid to the con rods and the cam followers. The inside of the exhaust and inlet valve channels also had to be polished: no obstruction to the flow was the name of the game. Those engines of the twenties and thirties, whether amateur or works’ run, were objects of industrial beauty.
Nearly all the drivers at meetings in those days had independent means of some sort. I don’t know how they behaved towards men of my class when they met us in ordinary life – probably ‘Do this, my man’ or something similar – but on the track it was another matter. I was never talked down to because I was the ‘Levy kid’. During the meetings it wasn’t unusual for the whole family of an aspiring driver to be sitting at tables in the pits, while a butler waited on them with dainty sandwiches and flowing champagne, especially after a win.
I once witnessed a tragedy which gave me an insight into the way these elite people hid their emotions. It was at the Brooklands Easter meeting, the opening meet of the year. One young scion, attempting to overtake on, of all places, the Byfleet banking, came adrift and shot over the edge of the track. The result was flames, smoke and one very dead driver. A couple of labourers were sent with a stretcher to bring the remains of the lad back to the pits while the family went on supping the champagne with very few apparent signs of grief. On the way home the crew talked about the crash. Tom Levy said, ‘That’s what they’re like, some of them seem not to have emotions, not like us.’
Tom Levy was never really ‘one of them’. First of all, he worked for a living, but, more importantly, he was Jewish. All the same, a lot of ‘them’ were his friends.
I was now beginning to exhibit the behaviour patterns that I would show all my life. Once I got used to a job I lost interest, packed it in and looked for fresh pastures and more money. I was still only earning fifteen shillings a week, not enough. As well as which, girls were entering my field of vision.
22
As we got older we began to see more of the girls and the sexual divide slowly began to close – this was usually because the girls took the lead. In my case it was a simple approach. There was a café around the corner from Kenton Street in Marchmont Street where a bunch of us spent our evenings nattering about the events of the day (that’s when we weren’t in Soho earning a bob or two). Without any warning this girl – her name was Peggy – who I had known since we were tiny, came across to me, put her arm through mine and without any emotion or bashfulness announced to all and sundry that ‘Vic and I are going for a walk up West’. That was it: by that simple action Peggy had announced that from now on I was her property and at the same time warned off any of her friends who might have designs on my body. I didn’t want any of my mates to think that I was some sort of a pansy, so I fell in with the idea. After all, Peggy was one of the better looking local girls and, not only that, she had just proved herself to be someone not to mess with.
The pair of us were almost the same age, but at fifteen Peggy was an almost fully developed young lady whose hormones were telling her that kissing a boy was only the start of things. As a young man I had none of these urges. I was more interested in whether Spurs were going to pulverise Arsenal next time they met, and how I was going to raise the cash to order one of those flash new suits from Harry Rubinstein’s tailor’s shop up the Cally. So Peggy, for all of her famous fighting spirit, had a job on her hands.
For instance, one time I arranged to meet her to go to the pictures. This was a special date and we were going to the Dominion on the corner of Tottenham Court Road and New Oxford Street. Unfortunately one of my mates from Harrison Street had come up with a bunch of tickets for a punch-up at the Ring, the famous boxing pub in Blackfriars. There was no competition. Peggy slipped my mind completely. Two days later and there was Peggy crying her eyes out; one of her mates came up and told me what a right sod I was. When I took her arm to say how sorry I was (a complete lie) she went into spasms of woe. Then suddenly, without warning, she lost her pathetic ‘little girl lost’ look and became a kind of Boadicea, a warrior type. She was fearsome in her attack on men in general and me in particular. I was lost. I didn’t have a clue what all the shouting was about but we eventually made it up. Peggy lived in Cromer Street and I used to take her for strolls around Holborn and Soho and into the classier cafés, which really impressed her. ‘How do you know all these people, Vic?’ My mum kept on about me bringing her up for a visit. ‘When are we going to meet this nice girl I saw you with the other day?’
Peggy and I were children of King’s Cross; we had everything in common, we had grown up together on the same streets and our families lived in similar circumstance, everyone crammed into two rooms. Peg’s family were, if anything, worse off. There was no way either of us could put on airs and graces. Peggy was well aware of the sort of boys I mixed with, and she also knew that I was what was called ‘a safe pair of hands’, which meant I was one of the boys who could handle themselves.