Authors: Victor Gregg
Eddie didn’t understand that while I was willing to give him the info about getting the oxygen I was going to steer clear of becoming involved in any more criminal adventures. I finished up giving him and his mates the lowdown on using the acetylene but turned down Eddie’s offer of taking part in ‘a nice little earner’, as he put it. In the end he and his two mates managed to lay their hands on the oxygen bottle but then discovered it was going to take a much larger team to carry out their diamond caper. It seemed to me that three teenagers with no organisational skills were on a hiding to nothing. And I was right: within six months Eddie and his gang were doing a stretch in Brixton Prison and in those days if you were handed a five-year stretch then that is what you served.
As we got older the influence of our street gangs began to wane. We were all going our own separate ways, forming new attachments and taking on jobs that took us out of the area. Mixing with girls no longer marked you out as a cissy. We never lost our suspicion of authority and this was made worse by the things that were happening around us.
Mosley’s fascist party was making big trouble. In the poorer areas of London, the East End and south of the river, ordinary people were divided into those who had work and those who hadn’t. Those with work were, on the whole, anti-fascist; men on the dole, on the other hand, followed the Mosley line that it was all the fault of the Jews and immigrants. The fighting in the streets changed; it was no longer gangs bashing each other up for the fun of it. Mosley was stirring things up and the result was racial hatred.
One Saturday morning in late March I was in one of the local cafés in Gray’s Inn Road, run by a man called Frankie, whose real name wasn’t actually Frank but Franz. He was a German ex-prisoner of war and had met and married a girl from King’s Cross. They’d run the café from as long as us lads could remember; the old man wanted to call the café after his son, also called Franz, but sensibly decided that ‘Frankie’s café’ was better than ‘Franz’s café’.
Young Franz, also known as Frankie, was in our own age group.
It was the older Franz who first introduced the locals to frankfurters. His missus used to cook them in a large boiler in the backyard and the smell of the cooking sausages drifted through the neighbourhood with the result that the café was seldom empty.
There was more to the café’s activities than supplying food and drink, however. It also provided a useful service to some of the local villains. In the distant past Franz senior had been apprenticed to a master jeweller, and any small trinkets that ‘just happened to be left lying around’ were taken in to the café, the stones removed and set to one side and the gold and silver melted down. Franz with his frankfurters and his little bit of fencing on the side was all right. He was one of us and a decent bloke, even if he was old enough to be our father.
I went into Frankie’s one day to find Frankie junior and four of the lads deeply into a game of solo. The cash on the table indicated that this was a serious game. One of the players was Roscoe, the Jewboy clarinet player from our now forgotten dance band. Roscoe was moaning that the game was a fiddle while the other three were raking in their winnings. The game ended and Frankie had put a pot of tea on the table, with some bread rolls and half a dozen of those tasty frankfurters, and as we got stuck into the feast the four of them brought me up to date on what had been happening, especially an attack on Solly’s greengrocery shop in Sidmouth Street. ‘A gang of kids threw a brick through Solly’s window yesterday.’ Rozzie summed the situation up: ‘We’re waiting to see what happens next. We reckon that as there’s two Jewboy shops next to each other a repeat performance is on the cards, in which case we’re going to do the Blackshirts over good and proper.’
The two ‘Jewboy shops’ in question were Ruby Solomon’s greengrocer shop and Bernie Morris’s oil shop, actually opposite each other on the corners of Prospect Terrace and Sidmouth Street. The Solomons had two boys, who most of our lot had known since infants’ school. The elder was nicknamed Solly but no one ever knew his real Christian name. Solly he was and always would be. His younger brother was called Isaac and of course we called him Izzy. The pair of them were always together. Solly belonged to the local boxing club and modelled his style of fighting on that of the illustrious Jackie ‘Kid’ Berg, ‘the Whitechapel Whirlwind’. Nobody messed with Solly: he was ‘one of us’.
Ruby Solomon was the matriarch of the family and a lady of wide proportions. She sat out on her front steps and held court with all the other women at her end of Sidmouth Street. Everyone called her ‘Mrs Ruby’. She feared neither man nor beast. More importantly, it was well known in the area that Ruby never refused a plea for ‘something on the slate’. At the other end of the street was the redoubtable ‘Auntie Elsie’, a part-time midwife and sort of mother confessor. Auntie Elsie was yet another of that breed of woman who stood no nonsense from anybody. If by chance any Blackshirt gang did come around to create havoc then they would find that the wagons were circled against them. Inevitably, probably encouraged by the ease with which they had got away with the attack on the Solomons’ shop, they came back for a second helping.
Roscoe and the crew he had gathered around him had been in the café since late morning; it was now late in the afternoon and they were on the point of calling the whole thing off. Then in dashed one of the small kids. ‘There’s a gang of ’em coming down from Swinton Street.’ ‘’Ow many?’ ‘About a ’undred.’ ‘’
Ow
many did you say?’ ‘Well, a lot of ’em.’ By this time we could hear the racket they were making. I worked out that we had about twenty, top whack, nevertheless we kept to the plan: half down to the other end of the street, the other half to let the enemy pass and then close up the street and get them in the net.
As it turned out, and luckily for us, there weren’t a hundred of them or anything like. The actual force was about ten of the hard nuts with the usual complement of onlookers and do-nothing supporters. In no time the Blackshirts (they were actually wearing their uniform) were herded together and pushed and shoved into the alleyway at the bottom of Prospect Terrace where they were brutally beaten up; arms and legs were broken, faces slashed, blood everywhere and when it was thought that they had been taught a lesson the defenders of Sidmouth Street disappeared from the scene.
This little fracas took place on Saturday afternoon and on Monday it was front-page news in the national dailies, blazed in big, forbidding, block capitals: ‘KING’S CROSS GANG’S RIOUTOUS BEHAVIOUR’, ‘INNOCENT CITIZENS ATTACKED’, ‘LONDON GANGS MARAUD THE STREETS’, ‘INNOCENT PEDESTRIANS ASSAULTED IN SIDMOUTH STREET’. They were full of it, and there was nothing about poor old Solly’s window being smashed. Police from another area came banging on doors in an attempt to identify the culprits but it was futile.
The press kept the pressure up for the rest of the week. I think another of Mosley’s mobs took a similar battering elsewhere. Roscoe and his little army maintained their vigilance, expecting a revenge attack at any minute, but the Blackshirts kept away from our part of the Gray’s Inn Road and never bothered the area again. They tried to get a meeting going in Chapel Street in Somers Town but yet again they received a hiding.
30
Towards the end of 1936 I packed in the job with Pickford’s. About the same time I enrolled in an evening class at St Martin’s School of Art so that I could continue with my music lessons. This was partly because my mother pleaded with me not to waste what she believed was my vocation in life. She really believed that my destiny lay in music. Mum had a point: so by enrolling I at least made her happy.
St Martin’s had its premises in one of the more unsavoury areas of the West End of London. Outside the gates of this highly-thought-of school were Pulteney and Berwick Street markets, and just to the east were the vice dens of Soho. In our small class of seven pupils there were four of us on violin, a couple of girls struggling to learn the cello and one on guitar. The class would start at seven thirty sharp, with each of us giving a rendering of whatever practice pieces we had been given the week before. The tutors were usually members of the bigger London orchestras and it was their way of earning a bit on the side. Everything was very easy-going but we learnt something about music and how it was constructed. And so I met up with Ron who, like me, was doing a stint at St Martin’s to please his parents. We both enjoyed making music but got mightily bored with the technical side. We were both young and all we wanted to do was to copy our favourites. Like me and my other pals, Ron and I couldn’t get enough of Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grappelli, much to the annoyance of our tutor who looked on any form of modern music as an abomination.
Ron’s family had come to England to escape some sort of oppression in Italy. His real name was Ronaldo. The family name was Beretta but they called themselves Barrett and owned a small restaurant just around the corner from Percy Street, to the west of the Tottenham Court Road. After class at St Martin’s, Ron and I usually spent an hour or two there, supping coffee and munching the occasional sandwich, all supplied free of charge. Ron’s Mum and Dad seemed happy that their son had a mate who shared his interest in music. Ron was far more gifted than I would ever be, but we worked well together and when we played as a duo in the restaurant the customers seemed to enjoy our efforts, even if we weren’t quite up to the standard of Grappelli and Reinhardt. The infamous Fitzroy Tavern was just around the corner from Percy Street and if the Tavern’s clientele needed a cup of decent coffee to sober them up after a day’s carousing it was to Ron’s family restaurant that they wended their unsteady way. So the place was always full with a ragbag of writers, poets and other arty-crafty hangabouts. I had drawn my last pay packet from Pickford’s on the Friday and, the following Wednesday, Ron and I were sitting in the restaurant enjoying a cup of tea and I was moaning about finding worthwhile work when up to our table comes a big, burly character. ‘You out of a job, son?’ I must have nodded or said something to the affirmative. ‘I can give you a job if you’re not too particular,’ says this bloke. ‘You won’t make a fortune but it’s work and if you do a good job, you’ll get well paid. Can you ride a bike?’
‘Can a duck swim? Of course I can ride a bike.’ The man handed me two one pound notes. ‘That will see you through to next Monday.’ Then he gave me an address in Denmark Street. ‘Be there at nine on Monday and we’ll have a chat’, and with that he was up and away. ‘Do you know who he is?’ I asked Ron. ‘I don’t know him except he’s one of our regulars.’ That was it then. I’d got money in my pocket and a job to start the following week. My worries were over. Then somebody shouted, ‘Come on, you two kids, give us a tune.’ Ron and I obliged with ‘Honeysuckle Rose’. When we’d finished all and sundry gave us a good clap but nobody thought of passing the hat round, so we broke all the rules by giving our services for free.
On Monday morning I walked round to a ground-floor-shop-cum-office in Denmark Street. I’d found out the man’s name was Abe Marks. He told me he made his money running errands for local businesses. ‘I’ll get a call and you go round and deliver what’s wanted. Remember, we guarantee speed, we’re the quickest postal service in the city. The most important part of this job is that you deliver to the person named and no one else. Do the job, don’t poke yer nose in what don’t concern yer, and you get fifty bob a week. Usually five days a week but you never know when you may be needed, the bike’s out the back, and Mrs Barnes comes in twice a week to sort things out. She’s nothing to do with you.’
I made off out the back to find a fairly new bike with a small front wheel to allow for the long box that was fixed to the front of the machine. I pumped the tyres up board-hard, trimmed the brakes, adjusted the saddle and then I was ready to start earning my fifty bob, an enormous wage for a lad not yet seventeen.
At first I spent my time charging round central London delivering small parcels, mail that couldn’t wait for the morrow, rolls of blueprints and plans to building sites, that sort of thing. I was doing everything that the couriers who dash round London today on motorcycles do, but I was years ahead of my time. Abe gave me my orders for the day and then he’d say: ‘I’ll be off then, son. Got some business to settle. If I’m not back when you’re finished you can buzz off home.’ The job was that cushy.
Of all the people I have worked for Abe Marks was the most colourful. His normal dress was a shabby pair of nondescript trousers held up by a pair of extra-wide braces and a belt that slipped down below his sagging belly. He always wore a bow tie: perhaps he thought it was in keeping with the bohemian lifestyle of Soho. On his feet he usually wore a pair of worn-out carpet slippers. He only dressed a bit more smartly when he had to go and visit one of his clients. He didn’t normally wear a hat and his bald patch made him look like an egg. He had a perpetual grin which seemed to cut his face in half. Abe was a character with a capital C.
I never discovered why my predecessor had left Abe’s employment, but after a bit I realised that working for Abe carried a certain amount of risk.
I had discovered that one of Abe’s most profitable sidelines was getting rid of stolen property that the usual fences wouldn’t touch. This sort of stolen stuff was taken round to Abe who passed it to me, making sure that he never actually touched it so there were no fingerprints on it. Then he would say, ‘Take this little lot round to Connie in Kirby Street.’ Kirby Street ran parallel to Hatton Garden and Farringdon Road. Connie the jeweller would melt down the gold, reshape the stones and sell the results in Hatton Garden. I then went and got the cash, and after everybody had had their cut, including the nutters who had stolen the stuff in the first place, Abe would pocket the rest. There were gangs involved and if you upset them they could play it rough.