Bombsites and Lollipops: My 1950s East End Childhood (5 page)

A steady bloke he wasn’t. The younger Ginger often worked ‘on the knocker’, selling goods door to door all over south-east England, so he was frequently away. He’d only reluctantly joined his dad in the betting business just before war broke out, preferring the freedom of the road to any real commitment.

Yet as they courted in the late thirties, he became fiercely attached to my mum, who was five years his junior; petite, dark, slim and fashionably turned out, she was a bit of a man magnet. And her cheerful, easy-going manner was equally attractive. As their relationship developed, my dad had a somewhat disturbing habit of sending one or two close friends to my mum’s house to ‘keep an eye on Molly’ when his knockabout life meant he’d be unavailable. Even during the war, when they’d started married life in a bedsit in Finsbury Park in London, his posting to Kent meant they weren’t together very much. On leave, he’d head for the pub most nights. So in a way, he’d led a semi-bachelor existence for years, his passions typical of the times: boxing, soccer, pubs, and lots of laughs. Even in Meerut, he’d managed to indulge himself with visits to the races, placing bets and playing soccer. (He sent us many photos to prove it.)

Now here he was in his mid-thirties, living full-time with a wife and a small child. One hundred per cent responsibility, which I suspect gave him the willies.

Though he’d left school at fourteen and was poorly educated, my dad had a head for figures and a talent for words – his letters home to my mum from India were beautifully written – so he could, at a push, have found steady work in a clerical position in an office after the war. He’d got brownie points from his superiors in the Pay Corps. ‘The Army always wanted Ging,’ my mum would frequently tell me as I grew up, her badge of pride that his destiny as a street bookie could easily have been otherwise.

But, of course, as a typical East Ender who’d grown up in Petticoat Lane around long-term duckers and divers with varying degrees of commercial success, the disciplined confines of army life, regular if low pay, and with some sort of permanence ahead, had scant appeal for my dad. And he needed cash. Fast. There was a wife and kid to consider now. So he took up the first offer that came his way – to work alongside his dad in Jack’s betting business.

The betting laws of the time were draconian: technically, it was only legal to place a bet if you were at the racecourse or the dog track. Well-heeled punters could legally run an account and have credit with a ‘commission agent’ working out of an office – but the commission agent was only permitted to take bets by phone. Out on the street or in the pub, handing over cash to place bets on dogs or horses was technically illegal, right up until the early sixties.

But there was a great deal of money to be made illegally because back then, betting on ‘the geegees’, or horses (and, to a lesser extent, the dogs) was more or less a national pastime. Gambling a few bob from their weekly pay was the working man’s one and only chance to improve his lot. The football pools had also started by then – but the daily or weekly bet was incredibly popular everywhere, just like the Lottery is nowadays.

This national passion for the odd bet meant that Ginger and The Old Man were in a prime position to exploit the post-war hunger for illegal betting. For a start, they were in a very good spot, in the heart of bustling, busy Petticoat Lane, renamed Middlesex Street in 1830 (by the Victorians who wanted to avoid references to women’s underwear), though everyone continued to call it by its original name. Their little ‘commission agent’ shop on Middlesex Street was very close to Houndsditch in the City of London precinct, the junction where the time-honoured East-End hustlers or traders and the more respectable City gents, or ‘bowler hats’, merged. Consequently, the law wasn’t much of a problem: a friendly bobby from the local constabulary would usually turn a blind eye to cash being handed over for bets in the pubs and streets nearby: a well placed ‘bung’, or cash bribe, usually also handed over in the pub, saw to that little fly in the ointment. And while it was all fairly new to my dad, The Old Man knew the terrain well; he’d been running a family business in the Lane for most of his life.

Before the betting business had been launched, the Middlesex Street premises had been a coal shop: this, in turn, had morphed over time from a local horse-drawn delivery business, though Jack’s dad, my great grandfather, had gone bankrupt more than once. So the network of contacts, both legal and otherwise, that Jack had made through a lifetime there meant my dad had a Chief Fixer to back him up if there were any problems. And as a Fixer, The Old Man certainly carried a bit of clout in the area.

One day, not long after my dad came home, one of the newer runners that Jack had employed to take bets and pay punters was picked up by the police. A lone copper spotted him carrying an unusually large bundle down Middlesex Street and, as suspected, further investigation revealed it contained some black-market ‘gear’, in this case, several dozen pairs of trousers, all new, sourced from who knows where. Clothing, of course, was still rationed then. This was definitely a ‘sus’ package, a discovery that could lead to a court appearance and a hefty fine.

Yet when the copper, also new to the area, marched the handcuffed and nervous man into the police station, his sergeant looked up in surprise.

‘He works for Jack Hyams, you fool. Get him outta here – or there’ll be trouble!’

So there it was. Jack wasn’t exactly a mafioso making people offers they couldn’t refuse but my grandfather was well established in his ‘manor’. So I doubt my dad agonised over his career choice. And my mum wouldn’t have tried to dissuade him, anyway. She was happy. Ging was back, she knew he wouldn’t see her short and, joy of joys, she had her little girl to look after. Yet she was determined to stick with an only child. A boy, instinct told her, would be A Bad Thing.

‘I’m definitely not having any more,’ she wrote in a letter to Sarah, who’d decided to emigrate to Canada after her time in Germany.

‘I always wanted a little girl and I got a little girl. A boy would wind up drinking in the pub all the time, just like Ginger and The Old Man.’

Such single-mindedness was in contrast to my mum’s easygoing demeanour. Maybe she was already concerned about our less-than-salubrious environment. Two kids in the tiny flat would have been a nightmare – it was bad enough humping a pushchair up and down the stone stairs when I was very little – though many still lived in far worse conditions, of course. But essentially, Ginger and Molly, hugely relieved that the war was finally over, just wanted to get on with life. They didn’t have ambition in the sense we now understand it. It was enough for them that they’d come through it all. The future would take care of itself. And my dad’s cash income as an illegal bookie would see us right.

And so began a routine, six days a week, that remained fairly unwavering for nearly two decades: each morning, my dad, smartly suited and booted, would take the number 649 bus down the Kingsland Road to Liverpool Street and make his way to the Lane and the ‘commission agent’ office, to take bets from the more affluent punters who had a phone, could ring through their bets and run an account: all totally legit. Early evening – and at lunchtime – once the pubs were open, he’d stroll round the corner to Houndsditch and park himself at the bar of the George & Dragon, drinking, wisecracking, swapping stories or taking illegal bets from punters; his usual gang of cronies, small-time crooks, market stallholders and cops around him, ordering big rounds of drinks for all and generally having a whale of a time. The Old Man, now in his sixties, would sometimes join him. But he was slowing down somewhat, hence his need for his son and heir to step in and keep the punters happy.

The pub doubled as a virtual office. If Ginger had a good day’s wins and came out ahead, the rounds for his gang – and often anyone else who happened to drop in – were frequent and generous. If he’d lost, the rounds were a bit more muted. Then, usually at closing time, he’d hail a cab by Liverpool Street station to take him down the sometimes foggy, almost traffic-free, streets to Dalston and home. On Sundays, when there was no racing, he’d usually venture out to the pub for the 12 to 2pm session, come home, eat lunch and sleep off the week’s transactions.

This was his working life, primarily a man’s world and a pretty macho one at that.

The first time he took my mum into a pub and asked her what she wanted to drink, she timorously suggested an orange squash.

My dad looked at her and started laughing.

‘An orange squash!’

‘Umm … well, I think that would be nice … or a lemonade,’ said my poor mum, floundering, not really knowing what she should be asking for since it was the first time she’d even been inside a public house. Public houses, East End or otherwise, did not form any part of the world she’d grown up in. They were totally unknown territory.

‘Look, I can’t go up to the bar and ask for lemonade,’ explained my dad patiently to this attractive young woman he’d already fallen for. She always seemed to be smiling. Or laughing.

‘They all know me in here. They’ll think there’s something wrong with me if I do that. ’ave a gin and it (gin with Italian vermouth), instead.’

That, in a nutshell, was my dad’s world. Buying stiff drinks, taking bets, having a laugh, taking the mickey out of his cronies – my dad was a terrible prankster, often crudely humorous. The butt of his jokes would often be the neighbours in the Lane and their families. One example was a Polish family who lived around the corner from the office. At some point, the family, whose surname was unpronounceable to locals, had been dubbed ‘The Polos’. Over time, as the mother produced child after child, one each year until there were seven kids, the nickname changed to reflect the popular advert of the late fifties: Polo, the mint with a hole.

Then, somehow, Mrs Polo became known around the place as ‘the bint wiv an ’ole’.

Having the bookies’ wad of readies to flash around obviously gave my dad a bit of gravitas in the upside-down, post-war East-End world, where one section of the population had very little and really struggled to get by, while the others, the traders, black marketeers or stallholders with cash, traded back and forth in virtually anything portable that you can think of – and didn’t really go without much. Unless, of course, they had a serious betting habit – and many did.

Even in those cash-poor years, it wasn’t unknown for the occasional dedicated punter to lay down a ‘monkey’ (£500) on a single bet. When you consider that even a ‘pony’ (£25) represented roughly two-and-a-half times the average working man’s weekly wages in the late forties, it’s obvious that some bookies were scoring very high in the prosperity stakes. And quite a few gambling men lost their shirts – and more.

All in all, accepting illegal bets probably seemed like a soft option when you take into account what so many in the country had endured through the blackouts, the bombs, the devastated lives and epic shortages of wartime – and still continued to struggle with in the years that followed. Is it any wonder that Ginger decided to take the easy option, throw the dice – and hope for the best?

O
ur street wasn’t exactly the sort of place you’d wistfully recall as the setting for an idyllic, rose-tinted childhood reverie. No gardens, fields or open spaces. You’d hear the odd sparrow chirping sometimes, but that was the only evidence of nature around us. This place was narrow and bleak, scarred by war damage and years of poverty. In the thirties, the area had been part of the beginnings of slum clearance. But then war broke out. Socially, the street also defied the somewhat sentimental legend that the chirpy, chippy East Enders endured the worst of the war years and beyond by sticking together like glue, helping each other out frequently and popping in and out of each other’s homes all the time.

Perhaps this was true elsewhere. But it didn’t apply here; the daily struggle to survive, feed the family and keep going took up all of our neighbours’ energy. People would greet each other, chat briefly – ‘looks like it’s gonna rain’ – then go about their business. There were fewer invitations to come round for a cuppa and cheerful, friendly exchanges than my mum had known in Leeds, where locals had made the evacuated family welcome. In any case, apart from our block of 12 flats, built in the late thirties but having mysteriously survived the bombs and the chaos, there weren’t any neat rows of terrace houses to pop in and out of. If you’re living amid ruin, relying on meagre rations to feed yourself and your family, you’re unlikely to be inviting the people next door round for a slap-up meal.

The tiny street was dominated by the handiwork of the Luftwaffe. Adjacent to our block of flats were the bombed-out remnants of what had once been two modest workmen’s cottages. Inside one of these derelict ruins, living heaven knows how, was a ‘foreign’ couple, rumoured to be from a faraway place called Cyprus. They never talked to anyone. And adjacent to the bombed-out cottages was what had once been a third one, knocked down by the local authority just before the war as part of the planned slum clearance and then turned into a public bomb shelter.

Almost opposite the old shelter was the front door to the corner house, badly wrecked but still inhabited by the Coopers, their toddler kids Bobby and his sister Mary, the family waiting stoically, like so many others, for the authorities to rehouse them. Their home, though damaged, damp and dark, was technically deemed to be ‘habitable’, so they had to wait a few years. Not surprisingly, all conversations with Mrs Cooper tended to be dominated by this topic.