Authors: Barry Miles
Daniel Farson first met Deakin in the French. Deakin was not in good shape: ‘I swallowed a raw egg but it was half way down
before I realized it was bad.’
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Farson gave a cruelly accurate description of the man:
He must have cut his ear while shaving for a ridge of congealed blood lay underneath and some of it had fallen on to the heavy
polo-necked sweater that had once been white. His pock-marks were livid in the light and dandruff lay in drifts around his
hair and even flecked his forehead. The fly buttons of
his jeans were open. He seemed to have eaten all his finger nails, and his nose was battle scarred from alcohol. But the seediness
was eclipsed by his huge Mickey-Mouse smile.
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The two Roberts, Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun, arrived in London from Scotland in 1941 and were befriended shortly
afterwards by Peter Watson, a wealthy arts patron who was instrumental in launching their careers as painters. In the forties
they were stars of the much publicized English Neo-Romantics along with John Minton, Keith Vaughan, John Craxton and Michael
Ayrton. But this was a short-lived movement, replaced by the equally dull ‘kitchen sink’ school, and Colquhoun’s last show
at Lefevre was in 1951. They had a few patrons, notably John Minton, but much of the time they subsisted on handouts. Colquhoun
showed a few monotypes at the Caves de France and there was the occasional sale. Unfortunately they had grown used to having
money, so when they did get some, they spent it. Usually on drink.
Anthony Cronin wrote: ‘MacBryde had, and retained to the end, a capacity to abandon himself gently and totally to the drink
and the moment, so that in the right company he achieved incandescence.’
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He described him as having a beautiful voice and a repertoire of Scots songs that ‘he was seldom reluctant to perform.’ Whereas
MacBryde was known for his Burns, Colquhoun was famous for his recitatives, usually taken from the last acts of Shakespeare’s
tragedies. People would gather hopefully at the French pub to listen to his deep baritone: he did a deeply moving Macbeth.
The Roberts were a curious couple: MacBryde was very much the bon viveur whereas Colquhoun’s Presbyterianism gave him a very
neurotic personality. MacBryde was a small man, with a round head, prominent bushy eyebrows and expressive, mobile features
like a clown. Cronin described him as ‘constantly in deft movement, even the way he picked up a glass or handled a cigarette
suggesting precision and sensitivity to nuance and detail’.
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He was an excellent chef and had the ability to conjure up gourmet food from unpromising ingredients. He extended his improvisational
skills to his housekeeping: boiling handkerchiefs in salt and ironing shirts with a heated tablespoon. He could be vindictive
and at times thoroughly unpleasant, such as when he shook hands with the poet George Barker for the first time, and had concealed
in his right hand the shards of a broken wine glass, which cut Barker’s palm. When drunk he would giggle and titter, wheedling
and begging his friends for money to buy a beer. Colquhoun, on the other hand, according to Dom Moraes, ‘was terrifying in
his cups: his thin body seemed
to buckle forward at the hips, while his legs weaved a wild way across the floor. In a thunderous, bullying voice, his eyes
unfocused, he would demand to be bought a drink.’
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When the pubs opened at 5.30, MacBryde would go off on his own, leaving Colquhoun at the Caves. When MacBryde returned later
in the evening, after making the rounds of the Gargoyle, the French, the Swiss or the Colony, he was usually drunk and in
a mood to pick a quarrel with Colquhoun. They had a limited range of topics: Colquhoun’s Presbyterianism and ‘the La-adies’,
for Colquhoun was not immune to the advances of an attractive woman, something that drove MacBryde wild with jealousy. The
arguments were pathetic, with Colquhoun jumping and skipping to avoid MacBryde’s petulant kicks. At home these arguments would
occasionally develop into real fights and they sometimes appeared wrapped with bandages and plasters. It was generally thought,
among the Roberts’ friends, that Colquhoun was not really homosexual. He was repressed, shy and inarticulate and had met MacBryde
at a formative age when they were both at art school in Glasgow. He was then too scared to approach women and accepted warmth
and friendship from MacBryde. Now, however, he would stagger around the Caves when drunk, asking women: ‘What colour are yer
bloomers?’ and, more aggressively: ‘I want ma hole!’ after which he would double up in quiet mirth, shocked by his own impudence.
As Anthony Cronin surmised, these were probably the sort of comments the really forward boys said to the girls at Kilmarnock
High School and that he only now felt confident enough to say.
Robert Colquhoun was generally thought the better painter. His work is usually described as deriving from Picasso but it takes
more from Braque, particularly
Woman with a Birdcage
from 1946 flattens the picture plane and concentrates more on decorative surfaces than the British would normally permit.
The Roberts were both criticized for this. Their careers were short-lived but there seemed to be a chance of revival when
Colquhoun was offered a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery to be held in March 1958. One condition was that he also
show some new work. He told Dan Farson: ‘This should mean a new lease of life. It may be a bit early to have an exhibition
like this, but the moment a painter has a retrospective there’s a move forward. I want to do something that looks like something’
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(he was born in 1914).
Colquhoun was excited by the commission and sequestered himself in his studio. He began painting much larger canvases than
normal ‘because it’s such a big gallery’. After completing a quantity of new pictures, the Roberts left for a well-earned
holiday, but while they were away thieves broke into
the studio and vandalized all their possessions, mutilating all the paintings. His life’s work was destroyed. On top of this
blow, the Council decided to condemn the building and they were evicted. This double whammy killed his spirit and Colquhoun
never recovered. He died at his easel in 1962 and MacBryde died in Dublin four years later, drunkenly dancing the Highland
fling in late-night traffic.
There was one other Soho Club where the forties bohemian crowd gathered. The Mandrake was started not long after the war by
Teddy Turner (‘volatile and Jewish’ according to George Melly
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) and Boris Watson, a huge taciturn unkempt Bulgarian refugee with swivelling, suspicious eyes, formerly called Boris Protopopov.
It began as a chess club, since chess was Watson’s great love and he managed to keep an eye on the club while simultaneously
playing a game. He had previously run the famous wartime hangout the Coffee An’ (named after his demand ‘Coffee an’ what?’).
For his new venture he rented an underground room at 4 Meard Street, (always pronounced ‘merde’ by the regulars), on the north
side of the street, almost next door to the Gargoyle, which he envisioned as being filled with patrons quietly plotting their
end games. In order to finance this activity the place obviously had to have a bar and food but inevitably the drinkers and
the drunks took over the place. Gradually Watson occupied more and more basement rooms until he had six in a row. In 1953,
the club advertised itself as ‘London’s only Bohemian rendezvous and the largest club. Application for membership (10s 6d
p.a.) must be made to the secretary in advance and the fact of advertising does not mean that everyone is accepted.’ The advertisement
featured a photograph of the interior showing an artist busily sketching a guitarist standing in front of a large painting
of a voluptuous nude. Several men are huddled over a chess game.
Entrance was gained down a narrow flight of steps, where the door was protected by a rusty metal grille. Once inside, the
customer passed through the restaurant and into a much larger room. A piano stood in the right-hand corner, and an angled
bar, presided over by a barmaid called Ruth, described by Daniel Farson as ‘Soho’s version of the barmaid at the Folies Bergère’.
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Here Nina Hamnett and the regulars like the acerbic Brian Howard had their smoky kingdom. Julian Maclaren-Ross was a regular
and became a great friend of Boris, sharing his love of chess. The Mandrake was not entirely free from prejudice; when Quentin
Crisp arrived one day Watson said ‘Buy him a meal and get him out of here.’
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Watson made sure his customers remained loyal by an arrangement
whereby half the value of any cheque he cashed would be in the form of credit at the bar. As few of his customers had bank
accounts, Maclaren-Ross included, this was very effective. Outside pub hours, the only way that drinks could be served was
with a meal so a collection of dry sandwiches were kept behind the bar for the purpose. When someone complained about the
state of them, Boris would glare and explain: ‘This is a sandwich for drinking with, not for eating!’ The next room was for
those who wished to drink coffee and read books and magazines. After this came the ‘quiet room’, and the chess players, who
by now had been banished to the most distant back room of all. By the sixties they had been joined by most of the painters
and poets, who used to gather there for talk and a glass of cider. Watson brought in fruit machines and served more expensive
food. Where there was once live music – guitar and lute recitals – there was now a jukebox. However, by the late fifties the
Mandrake became the venue for late-night impromptu jam sessions for jazz musicians and so enjoyed a new lease of life.
I used to enjoy going up to the Colony Room, in Dean Street. It was run by a woman called Muriel Belcher, and Lucian was in
there, and Francis Bacon, and so on, many writers and painters. She was a funny old woman, Muriel, very handsome, Bacon painted
her a lot… She was a foul-mouthed old thing, but witty, and famous. It was the centre for us in Soho.
GEORGE MELLY
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The French pub was very small and could become unbearably crowded. A favoured alternative was the Helvetia in Old Compton
Street, always known as the Swiss, which was much larger. The bar was decorated in olive green with concealed lighting. A
full lunch was available upstairs but in the snack bar tongue, lobster, crab, fish and chips and pickled cabbage were all
available at reasonable prices, as well as sandwiches. Bert, the Cockney bartender, was famous for his patter and his grimy
white jacket. The Swiss had a reputation for being a bit tough but it was never allowed to get too boisterous; the landlord,
ex-Detective Inspector Bill Buckley, never let anyone step over the line. It was in the Swiss that Maclaren-Ross first met
Tambimuttu in 1943 and Tambi famously told him to beware of Soho: ‘It is a dangerous place, you must be careful.’
‘Fights with knives?’
‘No, a worse danger. You might get Sohoitis, you know.’
‘No I don’t. What is it?’
‘If you get Sohoitis,’ Tambi said very seriously, ‘you will stay there always day and night and get no work done ever. You
have been warned.’
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The prime example of Sohoitis at work was to be found in Muriel Belcher’s Colony Room. One of the best descriptions of the
club in the fifties came from Colin MacInnes, who, changing Muriel’s name to Mabel, wrote: ‘To sit in Mabel’s place, with
the curtains drawn at 4 p.m. on a sunny afternoon, sipping expensive poison and gossiping one’s life away, has the futile
fascination of forbidden fruit: the heady intoxication of a bogus Baudelairian romantic evil.’
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Muriel was clearly a genius at creating atmosphere and was once described as conducting the bar like an orchestra, keeping
tabs on whose turn it was to buy a round, and making sure that those who deserved drinks but were too broke to buy them were
treated by those too parsimonious to offer. ‘Open your bead bag, Lottie,’ she would cry, or, if they were less than forthcoming,
put them in an intolerable position by declaring: ‘Come on everyone, this vision of loveliness is going to buy us all a drink!’
George Melly told Oliver Bennett: ‘Muriel was a benevolent witch, who managed to draw in all London’s talent up those filthy
stairs. She was like a great cook, working with the ingredients of people and drink. And she loved money.’ As Melly said,
Muriel was able to make every quip appear good, even when it wasn’t exactly a Wildean epigram. Her camp delivery made everyone’s
sentences sound witty and she could keep it up for hours at a time. She called all men ‘she’, including ‘Miss Hitler’, and
established a long-standing cult of rudeness in the club. For Muriel, ‘cunt’ (her favourite word) was a term of abuse, whereas
‘cunty’ was meant affectionately. If you were really in her good books she would call you ‘Mary’.
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Muriel Belcher was from Birmingham, where her parents, wealthy Portuguese Jews, owned the Alexandra Theatre. She was brought
up with a nanny and a governess. When her father, whom she detested, died in 1937, Muriel, her mother and her brother moved
to London. There, a year later, she started the Music Box on Leicester Place in partnership with Dolly Myers. The Music Box
was a theatrical and society club that catered to the more bohemian of the upper classes and the better sort of gay Guards
officer. It was much appreciated for its discretion. In 1947, when she was still running the Music Box, Muriel met Ian Board,
a commis waiter at the Jardin des Gourmets. Board was thinking of starting a valet service so Muriel made her membership list
available to him, thinking that many of her more wealthy members might wish to use his services. There were too many; it all
became too much for him, so when she opened the Colony on 15 December 1948 he became the club’s first manager.
In January 1949, few weeks after the Colony Room opened, Francis Bacon ran into Brian Howard in Dean Street outside the Gargoyle
and Howard told him that there was a new club opening across the street. Together they climbed the stairs. Bacon enjoyed it
so much that he returned the following day. Muriel clearly liked him and she made him an offer he could hardly refuse: ‘I’ll
give you ten pounds a week and you can drink absolutely free
here, and don’t think of it as a salary but just bring people in.’ She somehow knew that the people that Bacon knew were the
kind of people who would make a good club. Muriel: ‘But he always spent his money in the club as soon as he got it. You have
to remember he was getting far less for his pictures in those days.’
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Francis called her ‘mother’ and she used to call him ‘daughter’. Bacon brought in John Minton, Edward Burra, the two Roberts,
Colquhoun and MacBryde, Keith Vaughan and the Moynihans. They were all painters, but could be guaranteed not to talk about
art all the time, which would have been boring.