Authors: Victor Gregg
So we offered our profuse thanks to the chap who ran the day-to-day business of the Tonbridge Club and went over to the other side of the street to the Salvation Army's big, solidly built corner establishment.
Joe brought along a couple of records by Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli and was super-keen to get us doing the jazz thing. âThere's only five of them in the Reinhardt band, should be a cakewalk, they 'aven't even got a joanna.' It seemed simple to Joe, who always looked for the easy way if anything had to be done. âYes, but Joe they do have a string bass and two guitars, we've got a trumpet, a drummer and a clarinet, what we need is a bass player.' Anyway we all agreed that if we could find a way to make it work then we would be the local kings of jazz. So we practised and practised again and again and again and then, all of a sudden, both Fred and myself and Roscoe discovered that things were falling into place. Sister Evie even presented Joe with an old conductor's baton which he wielded with enthusiasm.
She turned out to be our fairy godmother. When she discovered that our bandleader couldn't play a note she came up with an old acoustic guitar. âI will arrange for you to have lessons, Joe, leave it to me.' Within a month Joe was sitting in strumming the chords like a real old hand. This was good because we all sensed that Joe had been on the point of giving up; we were getting better while he was standing still. Now the hours flew by, and the Masters of Rhythm were taking shape.
Joe came in to the Tuesday practice one day with the news that we had been asked to play at the Saturday evening dance at the Tonbridge, and what did we all reckon?
Meanwhile, out on the street dear Peggy had been having second thoughts about Gingernut and decided to reclaim her property. She had heard about the new band and that we were playing all the latest numbers. What with Joe and Smudger strolling round the local manor with their brand new sharp suits, and hair all shiny with the latest grease known as Brilliantine, they looked the business and the girls were attracted to us like moths to a flame.
While we were packing up our gear after finishing the evening practice, which included chatting up the girls, Peggy suggested we âgo for a stroll'. âWhat, at eleven o'clock at night?' âI want to, Vic.' That was it, I was suckered, so we started going out once again. âI didn't think you loved me any more,' said Peggy, laying it on thick and heavy. âWhat made you change your mind?' I replied, sensing that now I held the whip hand. Peggy came back with âMy mum said you must be a good man, she asked me if you had ever tried it on and I told her that you wasn't the type to do that. My mum said that she wished she had met a boy like you when she was young, and Daisy likes you as well.' Daisy was Peggy's younger sister and reckoned to be a bit of a stunner.
Peggy was well aware of the unwritten code of conduct â we had announced our pairing, or at least Peggy had â so if I dumped her now without good reason I would be thought of as someone not to be trusted, so I couldn't give her the brush-off without a good excuse. I was hooked and all it needed now was for her to reel in the line.
One day in the summer, after we had enjoyed an evening at the Tatler News Cinema in Charing Cross Road, I took her into a little restaurant I knew just off of Greek Street. I asked if she enjoyed the meal. âI didn't know that you could afford to come to a place like this, Vic. If you did it to impress me then you wasted your money. What you spent here should 'ave been put into the bank.' âWhat for?' says I. âIt's easy to earn a couple of bob round here.' âWell, don't you ever think about the future? Sooner or later we will get married and we will have to buy furniture and all sorts of stuff.'
Well, there it was. Peggy had tied the message to the mast for all to see, and I couldn't summon up the courage to tell her that getting married was indeed for the future â the very distant future. I was happy and proud enough to be in her company, but getting married? Marriage was for old people and nutcases. My bacon was saved by the advent of the ginger-headed nutter himself. It was during one of our practice sessions, the room was full and along with the band there was the usual crowd of girls and some of our mates. The air was full of tobacco smoke. Smudger's continual thumping of the pedal on his bass drum added to the general air of youthful exuberance. The hubbub slowly died down as a tall, ginger-headed geezer with two well-built muscle men came into the room and made his way over to the band. He started laying down the law about me messing with his girl. Apparently Peggy had gone on seeing him while she was seeing me. Roscoe, seeing that I was in trouble, picked up the leg of a broken chair and poked it in front of the lad's nose.
The trio were outnumbered and beat a hasty retreat. Peggy must have been impressed by her new lover's determination, because she decided that, for better or worse, the new boy was the best bet. It wouldn't be long before she was up the spout and walking up the aisle, her childhood over.
28
Now that I had a steady job and a place in the band my life was beginning to settle down. I was giving more money to Mum and I still had a couple of bob in my pocket. Brother John was toiling away as a delivery boy in a grocer’s shop in Pulteney Street Market. Mum was certain that I would become famous, and my grandparents both agreed that at last I had got my head straight. But if there was one thing that exercised its pull over us all it had to be the local Saturday dance hall. This was the rendezvous where girls met boys and vice versa, liaisons were made and most of the girls decided who was going to be their future husband and the father of their children.
The young men may well have had the filthiest of occupations throughout the working week but, come Friday night, preparations started for the Saturday night dance. Sisters or mothers were cajoled into putting a knife-edge crease in the trousers, the latest fancy tie was smoothed and ironed, out came the shiny cufflinks, the patent leather pointed shoes were buffed up and the soles of the shoes rubbed down with fine glass paper so that the dancer could exhibit his dexterity and slide over the highly polished dance floors. Before entering the hall the lads gathered together to chat about the better points of the girls they hoped to dazzle and what their techniques were going to be. The girls were already in position watching the boys as they came in and had been practising the latest steps all week with the aid of the gramophones in their bedrooms. The girls had it all worked out: they knew which of the opposite sex could carry them around the floor without mishap, the clumsy ones who couldn’t dance a step, the ones they fancied and the ones they wouldn’t be seen dead with. Then there was the band itself. It was fashionable for the band to be dressed in the same style. All their jackets were the same colour as were the bow ties, the trousers immaculately creased and the hair plastered down with the latest scented grease. If there was ever a cult figure it had to be the leader of the local dance band; he was the real star of the evening and that was what our mate Joe Brown wanted to be.
We had about three weeks to prepare for our debut. The Sally Army bandmaster sat in on one of our practice evenings and decided we needed help. He made us understand the need for a repertoire and taught us the importance of practice, a bar at a time. He gave Joe confidence by telling him that he didn’t have to be able to read music; his job was to keep order, keep to a strict tempo and to impose his authority by whacking us with the baton if and when we got out of line. ‘Where did you get that twig, Joe?’ says the bandmaster, pointing to Joe’s treasured baton. ‘Sister Evie gave it to me.’ The bandmaster disappeared and came back with a stick similar to the canes we had known at school. ‘This will do you far better than that flimsy thing,’ he says to Joe. ‘Just give them a whack every now and again. Even if they don’t deserve it whack them all the same.’ To Joe’s credit he ignored that particular pearl of wisdom.
Finally, the great day arrived: our debut in the world of dance music. What saved us was the insistence of ‘the General’, as we called the bandmaster, on the importance of tempo. If you’re playing music to dance to then keeping the correct time is more important than hitting the right notes. The General knew a thing or two about dance bands. Thanks to him we now had a repertoire of about thirty songs which I shuffled around for the next six weeks as the resident band of the Tonbridge Club. The General and his wife kept our noses to the grindstone. We knew that none of us would ever be able to match the dexterity of Django Reinhardt and his sidekick Stéphane Grappelli, but you can’t say we didn’t try.
The Tonbridge Club with its Saturday night dances became a beacon for the boys and girls of the neighbourhood. Then another crony from my childhood past turned up to join in the mêlée that was the small square dance floor at the club.
29
I had known Eddie Mathews since my earliest days at infants’ school. Eddie had always been one of the scruffiest of the scruffs, a prime example of the kids who came out of the hovels of Sidmouth Street, but here was Eddie in a well-tailored suit, flash tie and a pair of shiny shoes on his feet that would have put Fred Astaire to shame, walking in to one of the Saturday night hops at the Tonbridge with a couple of his mates in tow, both equally shined up.
The girls immediately started fiddling with their make-up. In no time at all the music came to a stop and there we all were shaking hands and remarking how well we were all looking. Less than three years ago we’d been knocking each other’s blocks off. So it ended up with me and Eddie chatting away in a corner of the hall. It turned out that Eddie was part of a small gang that got its living by doing a bit of breaking and entering, mainly small shops and offices up West. They’d got a dealer in Somers Town that took anything worthwhile and if they could manage two decent capers a week it was better than working for wages. ‘What you think, Vic? If you’re interested, you’re in.’ Eddie knew it was safe to confide in me; he remembered me as one of the gang. I was up there with the best of them. I told him I would think about it, which really meant that I was beginning to tire of my ‘safe’ job at Pickford’s and was ready for pastures new. Did I know anything about acetylene torches? This meant one thing only: safes. I told Eddie that I did indeed know how to operate a torch. When I met up with the gang for the second time, they said they had been told about an easy lift in some offices in Hatton Garden – uncut stones, no less, a real doddle. Not one of these potential number one villains had yet reached the age of seventeen. ‘Working for wages is a mug’s game, Vic, come and take a dekko at my motor.’ Eddie showed me his Wolseley Ten. He wasn’t eighteen yet so he’d taxed it in his dad’s name. ‘Fink about it, Vic.’
In the meantime our tenure at the Tonbridge Club was coming to an end, as were the days of the small-time dance halls. In their place, huge, glamorous Palais de Danse were springing up all over London, with their magnificent floors and the glitz and dazzle of the modern décor, and big-name bands. Saturday night at the Palais was the place to be seen strutting your stuff and making it with the impressive array of skirt that was always on parade. The Hot Club de King’s Cross was about to pass into history. Joe tried his utmost to keep us together but in spite of our energy and keenness we just weren’t good enough. Joe Brown’s Masters of Rhythm slipped into history and nobody missed us.
Discord between husband and wife was such a common occurrence that normally little notice was taken of a family bust-up. Sometimes a neighbour might shout out of a window telling the perpetrators to ‘Knock it off, you two’, or something less politely worded and more to the point.
One young couple who lived two doors away from us and up on the second floor were going at it hammer and tongs. When the girl started screaming the neighbours sensed that this was no ordinary marital dispute. Suddenly the screaming stopped. The small crowd which had gathered in the street below was beginning to disperse when there was a terrific crash as the girl hurled herself out of the window to smash, a couple of seconds later, on to the pavement below.
The ambulance from the station in Herbrand Street, just around the corner, was on the scene in minutes, closely followed by a police van. The law took the struggling young husband away to the cells in Judd Street and next day we learnt that their little girl had been taken into care.
Family fights were a daily occurrence, but women didn’t usually throw themselves out of windows. The favoured way of exiting the wretchedness of life in the slums of King’s Cross was to shut all the doors and windows, turn on the gas tap, place a pillow on the lowered door of the gas oven and go to sleep.
The second tragedy to hit the street came some weeks after the death of the young woman. The street woke to find the police had formed a cordon around one of the dwellings. In it a wife and the three young children had been discovered in a roomful of blood. Their throats had been cut while they slept. The husband had scarpered and had yet to be found. I think both these two tragic events had a very strong effect on me and on the decisions I was about to make.
Eddie came round to see me again and told me he was very keen about my using the acetylene torch. I offered to have a look at it for him and discovered that he had no oxygen bottle to go with it and didn’t even know one was necessary. I told him to get someone to lift a full bottle from the engineer’s yard at the back of Euston Station: ‘They just leave ’em lying around, they wheel them round in pairs fixed to a trolley so you’ll have to nick two together. Let me know when you’ve got the gear.’ Eddie gave me a slap on the back. ‘I knew you’d see sense at last, Vic.’