5. THE ‘SWINGING SIXTIES’ IN LONDON

 

Having arrived in London, George eventually found himself a furnished room near Clapham North tube station. He easily took the ‘culture shock’ in his stride, adapting to the London life-style as though born to it. He soon discovered ‘Harrington’s’ pie and mash shop in the Wandsworth Road, which remained a favorite eating establishment of his till the day he died. As well as pie and mash, he lapped up all the arts and culture London had to offer - the theater, opera, art galleries, cinema as well as the libraries.

 

In search of the Royal Shakespeare Company soon after his arrival in London, he once ventured on the Central Line as far east as Stratford before realizing the East End London district was not Stratford-upon-Avon. From a Glasgow perspective, both Stratfords are way down South and therefore not easily distinguishable.

 

Speakers’ Corner at Marble Arch became a favorite haunt of George’s, where he met most of his friends and acquaintances, including those who remained friends throughout his life, becoming mine too. Gay men from the provinces tended to congregate there, and in Fortes’ tea rooms across the road in Oxford Street.

 

He explored Soho and the West End, finding Piccadilly Circus and the surrounding area one of the most exciting places imaginable. He once told me of a film which first determined him to come to London. It was called ‘John and Julie’ and was made in color in 1955, all about two children who run away to London to see the Coronation. George would have only been 12 at the time, but the images of the capital in that film stayed with him till they became reality for him about 4 years later.

 

Times were often very hard for George. In those days, you were evicted from furnished rooms if the landlord or landlady found out you were gay, so George was frequently homeless and had to ‘do skippers’, slang for sleeping rough. With no job, he was too proud and independent to seek National Assistance, as Social Security was then called. The only time he did apply, homeless and literally starving, he was refused any help. He was thus forced to go ‘on the game’ as he had done occasionally in Glasgow, and at Marble Arch many of the others were also part of the male hustling ‘sisterhood’.

 

George was warned to steer clear of a male hustler with bleached blond hair known as ‘Rose’, who was thought to be trouble. True to his nature, George immediately sought out Rose and they struck up a life-long friendship. As very close friends in a platonic sense, they shared many hard times together.

 

In a furnished room in Islington where George once lived, he and Rose sometimes sneaked in ‘clients’, but they had to perform to the accompaniment of nails being banged into coffins from the neighboring undertakers. Rose went one further when he went back with a client to a shack on some wasteland near London Airport. On opening the door, there in the center of the room was an open casket, and the client told Rose to get in. Thinking his number was up, Rose did as he was told, keeping his legs over the sides in case the client tried to slam the lid shut on him. However, after helping him fulfil his necrophiliac fantasies, Rose was generously paid and driven back to the West End safe and sound, but a little wiser and more cautious in future. On another occasion a client had a heart attack and died on top of Rose whilst they were ‘on the job’ in an hotel bedroom.

 

Sometimes George had to hide in a cupboard whilst Rose did business with a client, and on one occasion George hid beneath the bed passing jam sandwiches up to Rose who ate them surreptitiously without the client noticing. They were both often starving, and Rose lived in a coal cellar off the Bayswater Road for a time. He had to arrive late at night and leave early in the morning so the residents of the house did not see him sneaking up and down the steps from the street leading to the basement area where the cellar was located.

 

George knew a gay vicar at St Martins-in-the-Fields, and sometimes when they had nowhere else to go they were allowed to sleep in the pews of the church after it had been locked up for the night. This was before the homeless were offered shelter in the crypt. They used to wash in the font in the morning. Rose knew another gay vicar who was a client of his in Kensington. A pop star of the day was also one of his regular clients.

 

Having both been taken back to a posh hotel by one client, they were leaving early the next morning, Rose wearing worn-out winkle-picker shoes with holes in the soles which let in water. As they were walking along the hotel corridor, they saw pairs of shoes left outside the doors overnight for cleaning. Coming across an expensive pair of brogues which looked about Rose’s size, he tried them on and found they fitted perfectly. They often wondered what havoc the guest in that room must have created with the hotel management when they received back a pair of scuffed old winkle-pickers full of holes.

 

One cold night when they had nowhere to stay, George and Rose discovered an unlocked basement with some boilers which ran the central heating system for the building. They crept behind these so no-one could discover them, and fell asleep hugging each other for warmth.

 

Next morning they crept out of the basement, and as they got out into the streets around Bayswater, people seemed to be staring at them. George looked at Rose and immediately saw why: his face was black as the proverbial soot which was covering it, and his shoulder length blond hair and clothes were also contaminated. George was in a similar state, his red hair blackened with soot. They quickly made for Notting Hill Gate tube station where they cleaned up in the gents’ washroom.

 

The male hustlers used to strike up close friendships with some of the girls on the game, and on one occasion two of the women had a voyeuristic client who just wanted to watch them ‘perform’ with another man. The girls asked George and Rose if they would be willing to simulate heterosexual sex with them for the benefit of the client, but George could not bring himself to even pretend to do something so against his nature, so he kept look-out by the door of the hotel room, whilst Rose put on a show with the two female prostitutes, and apparently the client was quite happy even though Rose was unable to even get aroused.

 

However, on another occasion Rose did impregnate a female prostitute who wanted to have a baby, something George could never speak about to me except to say that Rose was more butch than he acted and had ‘betrayed’ his sexual orientation, or words to that effect. After George died Rose let it slip out in an unguarded moment that he had a son he had never met presumably walking around somewhere - who knows if any of us have met him and perhaps had trade with him if his sexual orientation was the same as his father’s?

 

In those days it was easy to get clients. Just walking slowly up the Bayswater Road in a pair of white trousers was sufficient. George always prided himself on giving value for money, and even when homeless and starving, not having eaten for several days, he had his principles, never taking from a client more than he knew they could afford.

 

Some of the characters George and Rose knew in those days are only names to me - Red Riding Hood, Ginger Terry, Angel, Mother, Miss Smith. Other camp names read more like a shopping list: Coffee, Sugar, Tangerine, for example. The latter was short of stature and lived in West Ham. He would sit in the gardens in Leicester Square doing his knitting in the mornings waiting for Rose and George. He always brought apples and sandwiches, which they ate together.

 

Some of the camp bitches I actually met, like Nellie the Elephant, Fifi, Mad Myra and Big Bertha. George and I once ran into Bertha as we walked along Park Lane late one evening. He was strolling in Hyde Park by the railings, his large frame clothed in a sort of ankle length white smock, like some fallen angel.

 

‘The police have just pulled me dear,’ he told George. ‘They asked me what I was doing in the Park at this time of night, and I told them I was looking for a man.’

 

Most bitches were more discreet, but many spent time in jail, including many of George’s close friends. Somehow George managed to avoid this experience.

Rose was once arrested in drag along with some female prostitutes and ended up in Holloway (women’s) Prison, before they discovered he was a man.

 

Rose was conscripted into the Army in the days of National Service, despite telling them he was gay. He claims he had a whale of a time sleeping in a different barrack bed every night till the Army threw him out. ‘Well I told you I was gay, but you wouldn’t believe me’ was Rose’s response.

 

In the days before the 1967 Act of Parliament which partly legalized homosexuality, gays had their own language known as the ‘polari’ with which they could safely converse in public. It was introduced to the general public by the characters ‘Jules and Sandy’ played by Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick on radio’s ‘Round The Horne’, but George told me the meaning of many of these funny sounding words. A passive or effeminate gay man was an ‘homy-polone’, ‘HP’ or ‘bitch’. A ‘polone’ was a real woman, and ‘sharpies’ or ‘lily law’ were the police. The language was a mixture of Italian (such as ‘manjari’ for food, ‘capella’ for hat), theatrical slang and backward pronunciation - such as ‘ecaf’ or ‘eek’ for ‘face’. Words like ‘naff’ and ‘cod’ for something unattractive have now passed into more general usage.

 

George and Rose once lived near each other in Bayswater, George sharing a room with a female prostitute named Roxy. Rose shared with fellow male hustler Sugar, who wore a white polka dot flying jacket with black stars on it. Nearby was either the old American embassy or some building attached to it, and Rose and George sometimes got G.I.s from this building as clients. They would take them back to George’s rooming house and sneak them into either the big bathroom or the toilet, trying to avoid Roxy’s boyfriend who took potshots at the clients with his airgun. American G.I.s were fine, but Australians were apparently bad payers, according to Rose, though Roxy’s friend Meat-Cleaver Kate (so called because her face resembled this implement) went with them, glad of any business she could get.

 

One evening Rose and George were walking in Hyde Park when they spotted Coffee sitting on a seat with a client, who was panicking and called to them for help. They discovered Coffee had fallen into a deep sleep, being thoroughly exhausted from the effect of drugs and lack of sleep. He had actually fallen asleep with his hand firmly clasped round the client’s member in the middle of giving him a hand-job, and no amount of shaking or shouting could wake Coffee up. The client was frantic in case the police came along and found him in this compromising position, so George and Rose with great difficulty eventually managed to prise Coffee’s hand open, but apparently they almost had to break his fingers to do it.

 

Not all the bitches who congregated at Marble Arch were on the game, and though the hustlers sometimes criticized those who ‘gave it away for nothing’, there was a camaraderie between all those who met up at Speakers’ Corner, both gay and straight. George often spoke fondly of Aggie, an elderly religious woman who, bible in hand, spoke there for years.

 

One day George and Rose were talking with an attractive acquaintance at Marble Arch, and a friend of theirs whose real name was Arthur kept saying to Rose:

 

‘Introduce me to your friend’.

 

In the end Rose momentarily interrupted his conversation with the young man to gesture impatiently with his thumb over his shoulder to Arthur, saying by way of introduction in an annoyed tone:

 

‘Oh, this is Nellie the Elephant.’

 

One of their acquaintances around this time was Quentin Crisp, who then lived in a room off the Tottenham Court Road. They used to go back to his room and chat, or sip tea together in a cafe. George was something of a wit himself, and kept a book of his own and other people’s philosophical, funny and clever quotations, so he must have enjoyed Quentin’s company. One of my favorites from George’s book is the following:

 

‘The only time I was ever in bed with a woman was when I was born.’

 

London was full of characters in those days, but now, like Mr Crisp, they only seem to be found in New York.

 

George and another friend from Marble Arch, Lena, used to sometimes drag up for fun, or to go to drag balls. George looked very pretty in drag - he had a small face, and with make-up and a wig could easily pass as a woman. Some bitches regularly hustled in drag, and two I later got to know had both adopted French-sounding names - Fifi and Andre. When George was in drag he went by the name of Gina, short for Georgina of course.

 

Close as George and Rose were, they often fell out with each other, but it never lasted long. There was the time Rose stole George’s Christmas pudding from the larder, an incident George often told me about. The strange thing is George never really liked Christmas pudding. In later years Rose’s partner, Neil, regularly made whole batches of enormous, rich, traditional Christmas puddings and George and I always got one, so I think Rose’s debt has been repaid many times over.

 

On another occasion when George had a room just behind Leicester Square in Lisle Street (now part of Chinatown), Rose arrived late at night outside with a client but George would not open the door. Impatiently Rose bawled up at his window:

 

‘Open up, you fucking cow, I know you’re in there.’

 

So George got evicted from another furnished room. Just around the corner in Gerrard Street (now the main street of Chinatown) above a shop on the corner of Macclesfield Street was ‘Bobby’s Bar’, a sort of early gay disco. This was one of the places George and Rose regularly frequented, to dance to the hits of the day. There were many other gay ‘dives’ in Soho, and also out in places like Chelsea and The Angel. Some were sleazy, some were so packed you could not move. Things went on then which, until the 1990s when unofficial ‘backrooms’ sprung up in many gay venues, would never have been tolerated so openly in the supposedly enlightened 70s and 80s.

 

George often said that as soon as the 1967 Sexual Offences Act was passed supposedly legalizing homosexuality under certain very restricted circumstances, the big clampdown started. Only insipid, respectable gay establishments were allowed under this Act, so all the rest had to be closed down, especially since they were now advertised in the new gay press. Before the 1967 Act only the initiated few knew of the existence of the various gay venues, so they got away with more. Other countries in Europe, and many states in the USA and Australia, have much more tolerant laws than our own, so Britain seems to be the only place where supposedly gay liberation directly brought about the closure of many venues where gay men used to meet.

 

The Biograph cinema in Victoria was one such place, and it was there I later met George. It vied with the Electric cinema in Portobello Road for the title of Britain’s oldest cinema. The Biograph opened in 1905, and was a meeting place for gay men for many decades till it was suddenly demolished without warning in the early 1980s. Sunday afternoons it would be packed out, and you would see a long line of men queuing outside before it opened. The innocent passer-by must have often wondered why two mediocre old films were so popular. (There used to be continuous shows consisting of two films with short intervals in between. There were no adverts, cartoons, trailers, shorts or newsreels). When it closed, a lot of people found their whole lives disrupted, with nowhere to go on Sunday afternoons, and the main London ‘social club’ for meeting other gay men gone. The things that went on in the dark rows of shaking seats were quite outrageous, but nobody minded, except perhaps the woman who walked out one day with white stuff all over her hat which wasn’t dropped by a passing pigeon, according to George, who saw how it got there from the row behind where she was sitting quite oblivious to what was going on around her. The staff all knew, from Flo in the Box Office to Tubby who sold ice-creams between films and shouted out:

 

‘Half-time, change partners’, or even more boldly: ‘Change hands’.

 

Even the police knew what went on there, and turned a blind eye. They have been known to tell gay men caught in the act in Victoria Station toilets to ‘go down the road to the Biograph if you want to do that sort of thing.’

 

So the sixties certainly ‘swung’ for George, Rose and many others, but this was not the case for all of us.