Up West (25 page)

One who was never a part of this ‘in' crowd was my old friend Bill. He didn't enjoy either violence or what he saw as their particular brand of bitter and spiteful humour, so he avoided Bacon's crowd. Bill was a variety artist in his day and a gentle soul who, being a child of his times, had felt compelled by convention and the law to conform and that meant matrimony.

‘When Marie left me it was a blessed relief all round,' Bill admitted ruefully over a cup of tea at his home in Neasden. ‘And of course, it made everybody feel sorry for me. But the truth was, I was making her bloody miserable and the strain of keeping up appearances was driving me to drink. That's how I sometimes came to be in the same pubs, like the French, as that Farson bloke and that little shit, John Deakin. I'd drown my sorrows any chance I got, and I liked to get in to Soho. I never went to the Colony though, not my kind of place at all. I did go to Gerry Campion's clubs, he was a sweet bloke and he turned a blinder to us lot as long as we kept it clean and discreet.'

I asked Bill why he married if he knew that he was gay. ‘It was expected. My mum seemed to expect it and so did
Marie and her mum. Then there was her brothers; big they were, all of 'em, I was scared of them.' We talked a bit about prevailing attitudes at the time, then Bill added, ‘There was the law, don't forget. My mum would have had my guts for garters if I'd been up in front of the beak.'

Others, like Colin, simply resigned themselves to a lonely bachelorhood, which in his case was in Hampstead. ‘I lived with Father for many, many years. This is the house I was born in,' Colin told me. ‘I was too afraid to seek out men like myself until I was getting on in to middle age. Even after the law changed, I was still too terrified of blackmail and of losing my job at the bank.'

When Colin's father passed away, Robert, a colleague from the bank, showed him the way. The West End was where they went to meet friends and to socialize. ‘There was the Crown and Two Chairmen in Dean Street, that was a pub we liked,' Colin recalled. ‘Afterwards there was an all-night coffee stand, just off Wardour Street, down an alley, we'd go there after last orders, late at night. There were clubs, but they were always moving around, you had to have radar to find them.'

We talked for a bit about how persecuted gay men were in the fifties and then got on to the happier subject of food. ‘Gennaro's was one place we went, for special occasions – and Wheelers. We once saw that artist chappie there, Francis Bacon, with some cronies. Not our sort at all. I was never “with it” enough for the clubs or that arty crowd. I felt out of place.' Colin talked of the need to protect his job and of how
disastrous being ‘found out' as gay would have been both to his prospects of advancement, and his being employed at all. ‘Of course, the bank never knew. We both knew that we would have been out on our ears if they had.'

The all-night coffee stand that Colin referred to was also remembered by Leo Zanelli. ‘Just off Dean Street, there is a little street there, Bourchier Street, through to Wardour Street. There used to be an all-night café, there, with a van. If you stayed there an hour you'd bump into twenty or thirty prostitutes, loads of young fellers, several gay fellers, everybody.' Leo's experiences gave the lie to the official view that gay men were predatory, out to make ‘converts'. ‘I was aware of queer people, as we called them then, hanging around the all-night café in Bourchier Street, but I was never bothered by them. I can remember my mate Billy, chaps coming up to him and saying, “Excuse me, my friend over there likes you.” He'd say something like, “Sorry, his tits aren't big enough,” and they'd walk away.'

Colin didn't mention the gents' urinal a little further up Bourchier Street, where it becomes too narrow to drive through, at the Wardour Street end. Leo Zanelli remembered that it was ‘one of these big green cast iron places, and it was difficult to use because of course the gays were cottaging there all the time'. When it finally disappeared, a policeman told Leo that ‘it had been purchased by a Texan who'd taken it to America because he wanted it to remind him of the Good Old Days. Whether he meant the cottaging or just general life in Soho I don't know.'

The Sexual Offences Bill of 1967 allowed consenting males over the age of twenty-one to do as they pleased in privacy, but being outed as a gay man or a lesbian could still mean instant dismissal from a job or career. And of course, younger people were unable to follow their inclinations, even though their heterosexual peers were free to indulge as long as they had reached sixteen, the age of consent. The logic behind this discrimination was the illogical fear that older ‘queers' would lead young boys astray whereas, according to the law, it was perfectly all right for their heterosexual brothers to seduce schoolgirls of sixteen.

Soho has long offered asylum to those who found the outside world a hostile place. Way back in the eighteenth century, the Frenchman Chevalier d'Eon lived happily as Mademoiselle de Beaumont in Brewer Street. Mademoiselle sought sanctuary in Soho when moves were afoot to certify her as a lunatic in France. Far from ostracizing the cross-dressing Frenchman, Sohoites took her to their hearts, and couldn't have cared less that she was ‘a confirmed bachelor' who chose to live as a woman for most of the time.

Occasionally, she reverted to her male form, and there was some confusion among the population as to her actual sex. Soho being Soho, bets were taken. Casanova declared categorically that d'Eon was a woman, on account of her shapeliness and her disinclination to take female lovers. It was only when d'Eon died that the matter was cleared up once and for all. Mademoiselle had been born a man.

In the fifties, cross-dressers were known as transvestites.
My Great-Uncle Norman was one. I never met him, as he died when I was a baby, but I understand from my mother that he was a lovely, gentle man and half of a devoted, heterosexual, but childless couple. Norman had his clothes and his wife, Dorothy, had hers. He had many garments made by a specialist dressmaker who worked in rooms above a shop in Berwick Street. His outsized ladies' shoes came from a shop in Walker's Court that supplied footwear to showgirls and larger sizes for pantomime dames, drag queens and other cross-dressers who, like Norman, had no connection with show business at all. He repaired radios.

Sometimes Dorothy and my mother would enjoy a day out in Soho shopping with Norman. Mother told me that the shopkeepers and the dressmaker showed no surprise at fitting a man into ladies' wear. ‘The dressmaker was a real charmer called Nat and he seemed to be genuinely fond of Norman. He had been dressing him for years.' Mother thought that Nat might have been a fellow cross-dresser. ‘Norman bought his wigs in Gerrard Street. I know that he used to go to dances somewhere in the West End, where there were other men dressed as women.'

I remember walking along Old Compton Street fairly early one Monday morning when I was a child. Ahead of me was a young lad in school uniform, a satchel over his shoulder. There were two cross-dressers walking towards us, the seven o'clock shadows under their make-up being the only giveaway that they were men heading home after a night on the town. I noticed the schoolboy do a double-take
as it dawned on him that the two ladies were, in fact, men. His shoulders began to shake with a fit of the giggles and without a word passing between them, the glamorous pair parted as they drew abreast of the boy, lifted him gently off the ground, turned him upside down, walked on a few feet, then just as gently turned him the right way up and put him down again. Then they winked at me and carried on as if nothing had happened.

Great-Uncle Norman was not the only cross-dresser that Mother knew. There was Violet as well, who had been at teachers' training college with Mother, and who lived in Baker Street and worked in the West End. I remember Mother taking me to meet her college chum for tea at the Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch.

The person who walked towards us had a very short, severe haircut. She wore a tweed three-piece trouser suit in an age when women did not wear trouser suits, as well as a shirt, a tie and, of all things, a monocle. I wasn't sure why this slender man was called ‘Violet' and assumed that he was like ‘Rosie', the street person who hung around Berwick Street market and wore roses tucked behind his ears. But when Violet spoke, her voice was definitely female.

It seems that, while male cross-dressers were often straight, like my Great-Uncle Norman, most women who cross-dressed in the fifties were lesbians. Many lived with their female partners as ‘man and wife'. One such pair were Rene and Suzie. Rene, or Irene as she was christened, was the butch partner and Suzie the ‘femme'. Rene wore man drag
right down to Y-fronts, vests, Brylcreem and liberal quantities of aftershave. Suzie was never to be seen in anything but full make-up, dresses, skirts, blouses and high-heeled shoes. Suzie wouldn't have dreamt of wearing slacks, as we called them in those days, even in the privacy of her own home. The couple lived in Brewer Street, and would sometimes volunteer to take me to the park or the zoo. Suzie had been a prostitute when she and Rene had met, and gave up the game when it was obvious that their relationship was a keeper.

I remember the couple with great affection and was sure that they were happy together. It is only with adult hindsight that I realize part of the charm of looking after me was that they could pretend, for the odd afternoon at least, that they were a complete family, something I am guessing they must have longed for.

A Polari speaker would have called the operation that changed ordinary seaman and Liverpudlian, George Jamieson, into the stunningly glamorous April Ashley ‘a remould'. Hers was a familiar face in the West End, even before she became one of the first transsexuals to undergo a sex realignment operation. I remember April being pointed out to my father by his friend, Campanini, although I didn't know what they were talking about at the time. All I could see was a lovely-looking, smartly dressed woman sitting in the window seat of a restaurant as we passed by. As April Ashley says about herself, ‘I was exquisite, darling – slim shoulders, wonderful legs, incredible skin and a 23 inch waist.'

Unwittingly, April Ashley drew the attention of the law-makers
to transsexuals. Before she married the Honourable Arthur Corbett, neither the law nor the
Sunday People
newspaper had really noticed the anguished men and women who felt that they'd been born in the wrong skin. The law didn't notice, either, when April met Arthur at Le Caprice restaurant in 1960, and the couple courted and wed.

Sadly, the
Sunday People
did notice this. In 1961, an article outing April as a transsexual and, worse, a transsexual married to an aristocrat appeared. ‘Lower drawer' residents were not supposed to hop in to ‘upper drawer' territory, as Peter Wildeblood had noted in
Against the Law
. That may well have been at least part of the essence of April and Arthur's ‘transgression', because in 1963 pressure was applied to Corbett by his family to dump his wife or risk losing his inheritance. As the latter included the title of Lord, £4 million and an estate in Scotland, Arthur sought to have his marriage annulled, claiming that he had not known that April had been born a man. The court found for the not-so-honourable Arthur and the marriage was duly annulled. The shattered and traduced groom, who also enjoyed cross-dressing, was able to keep his money, his title, most of their joint possessions and several of April's beautiful frocks.

‘My case unmarried all the thousands of transsexuals living in Britain,' April told an interviewer. Whether, at that stage, there were that many transsexuals who had had the surgery is open to debate, but there were certainly a good few living as man and wife. What London's West End had taken easily in its stride was not true of the rest of the country, and April
was driven in to exile. ‘The government condemned me as a freak,' she said as she packed up and left for America.

A transsexual who did not feel the need to emigrate was Angel, a regular at the Nucleus. Hers was a familiar face in and around Soho for many years and as Gary said in his interview, ‘Angel was about the first transvestite who'd had the operation.' I asked if Angel was good looking, as April Ashley was, and still is. ‘Yeah, I suppose so,' he said. ‘Dark hair. Course, we had quite a few gays at the Nucleus. We had a gay waiter who was very funny. He lived in St Giles High Street.'

I expressed my surprise that both the waiter and Angel were out in those tricky times. ‘They didn't mind us knowing,' Gary explained. ‘We were easygoing. We were an odd society of people, and when you say we were bohemians, in a way we were, and we were very broad-minded, so . . . Angel came down to my coffee bar a lot. She wasn't a poet or a musician or anything – her fame was her transsexuality.'

Several factors have led Sohoites in particular, and West Enders in general, to take a ‘live and let live' attitude towards unconventional sexual tastes and orientations. For one thing, the area has a long association with theatrical, artistic and bohemian types, known for their tolerance, and celebration, of difference. Most importantly, Soho's population includes the descendants of refugees from all over Europe, who, having known persecution themselves, show a marked disinclination to persecute anyone in their turn. And, of course, Britain was the only country in Europe to make a crime of homosexuality.
The waves of French, Italian, German, Swiss and Greek immigrants had no history of legalized homophobia and therefore neither did their descendants.

It was 1967 before the law was finally changed in Britain, and consenting adult males were, at last, no longer committing a crime when they enjoyed sex with each other. This reform, based largely on the conclusions of the Wolfenden report into homosexuality that had been commissioned a decade earlier in the wake of the Montagu/Wildeblood case, was seen as a keynote piece of legislation in defining the liberalism and ‘permissiveness' of the sixties. All it did in reality was codify a ‘live and let live' philosophy current in the West End for decades – even centuries – if we remember Frenchman Chevalier d'Eon, aka Mademoiselle de Beaumont and her friends.