I spent many hours walking into Soho, or more likely through it, even before settling into my various offices in Fitzrovia. While based in Charing Cross HMS on Fulham Palace Road from 1975-1978 I often ventured eastwards via Soho, usually with visiting the – then many – secondhand bookshops along Charing Cross Road foremost in my mind. In fact, those bookshops were like a second home. I got to know some of the booksellers and glimpsed the occasional familiar face (in Any Amount of Books I once managed a brief chat with Michael Foot, a notorious bibliophile). It was the proprietor Any Amount of Books, incidentally, who purchased several hundred of my books when I retired from UCL in 2013 and had to clear and vacate my office.
Anyway, Soho was a London village I traversed regularly. It was more sleazy in the 1970s than it is now. Much of London, it seems, has been socially (and ethnically) ‘cleansed’ during financialised/rentier capitalism. ‘Walk-ups’ and clip joints are spread more parsimoniously now and there seem to be fewer unkempt and authentically bohemian haunts. Maybe this is a process that began to accelerate through the 1960s, because in the 1950s Soho still had more than its share of artists and aspiring literary figures who committed much of their lives to experiments with their sexuality and remaining in their cups. Some, like Dublin-born Francis Bacon and Berlin-born Lucian Freud, Sigmund’s grandson, managed sufficient self-discipline between extended bouts of drinking to become significant artists.
I was more familiar with the book and music outlets. As I grew more interested in jazz following visits to New Orleans I stopped regularly in search of new jazz cassettes (I also accumulated a number of early Bowie recordings for my daughter Rebecca), and subsequently jazz CDs. The bebop era in general, and Charlie Parker in particular, fascinated me most; Billie Holiday too. I now have a couple of hundred recordings. I find I can concentrate, think and write with jazz playing in the background but not with most other genres.
Like Fitzrovia, Soho has a rich cultural pedigree. Seventeen year old Thomas De Quincy spent much time on the streets in 1802 after fleeing his home in Manchester. He slept in shop doorways before taking temporary shelter in Greek Street. In Confessions of an English Opium Eater he recounts how Anne, a prostitute he had befriended, saved his life when, hungry and exhausted, he collapsed outside a house on Soho Square. In 1811 Shelley, fresh from being sent down from Oxford for writing his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism, took lodgings in Poland Street prior to eloping to Scotland with the 16 year old Harriet Westbook.
Of the litany of adventures recounted in Nick Rennison’s Bohemian London, special mention might be made of John Snow and Karl Marx. I well remember visiting the site of John Snow’s water pump in what was then Broad Street, now Broadwick Street. In 1854 the physician John Snow, in a seminal moment for public health, demonstrated that a specific local water pump was the source of a severe cholera outbreak. This gave the lie to the common notion that cholera was spread by ‘miasma’ or ‘bad air’. My old friend from Emory University in Atlanta, USA, celebrated Snow’s achievement with a pint or two in the John Snow pub (from memory, the site of the water pump is indicated on a – scarcely visible – stone outside the pub).
It is well known that Marx spent time living in Soho, living with his wife and children in a two-roomed attic flat in Dean Street rented from an Italian cook called Giovanni Marengo. The family was subsisting on the edge of poverty despite Engels’ help. The accommodation was apparently sparse and unkempt. Marx was mostly preoccupied with his life’s work, much of it being done in the British Museum Reading Room. But he did relax on occasion. His fellow German and founder of the Social Democratic Party, Wilhelm Liebknecht, recalls one epic pub crawl up Tottenham Court Road in the 1950s. They ended up, along with another German exile Edgar Bauer, in the backroom of one drinking den in the company of a group of English clubmen known as Oddfellows. Banter turned into debate, thence to argument. The three Germans exited at a canter and, much the worse for wear, began hurling paving stones from a pile they chanced upon at the street lights. They smashed four or five before a policeman on the beat heard the noise and summoned support. They were chased into Fitzrovia where Marx’s familiarity with the area enabled them to escape.
Back to personal experience. I have long spent time writing in Soho, more in cafes than bars: too many to mention here. I will pick out one, Café Boheme just off Cambridge Circus. Gone now, it was a venue for live jazz. I recall in particular that it was a favourite port of call of another Emory friend, world system theorist Terry Boswell, who was to die in his 40s from motor neurone disease. He would take scripts to grade in Café Boheme when it was his turn to direct the annual Emory University Summer Programme in Comparative Health Care. Like me, the jazz drew him and we would meet there for a beer and chat. We were particularly impressed by a young jazz singer whose name we were never to glene. Stacey Kent also sang there regularly and has gone on to greater things.
Annette and I went with Terry and other Emory friends to Ronnie Scott’s in Frith Street more than once (it’s not easy when you live out of town because the main event often kicks off around midnight). These were mostly in the days of smoky darkness, just how a jazz venue should be we thought. You could sit with a drink for a set without being hassled (which was ideal for scrimping students).
Ronnie Scott, a tenor saxophonist himself, opened the club in October of 1959 in Gerrard Street (it moved to larger premises in Frith Street in 1967). Many a noted American jazz player has performed there. Jimi Hendrix’s last performance took place there in 1970. Ronnie himself was taught to play by Vera Lynn’s father-in-law. Charlie Mingus once said him: ‘of the white boys, Ronnie Scott gets closer to the negro blues feeling, the way Zoot Sims does’. Depressed while recovering from surgery for tooth implants, Ronnie died from an overdose of barbiturates aged 69. I always understood that he committed suicide, unable to play the saxophone any more; but it has also been claimed that his death was accidental.
The club is so different now: sanitised, if healthier, more like a themed restaurant. I can’t remember who we heard in Terry’s company, but I recall going later to hear Clint Eastwood’s son Kyle perform there.