“It’s not name dropping, but not many people can say, like me, that they spent the day with the likes of Francis Bacon or that boring drunk Dylan Thomas. You don’t forget things like that.”
You don’t. In 1980 I discovered The Spectator. It was the era of Alexander Chancellor, Dick West, Auberon Waugh, Paul Johnson, Ferdinand Mount and Patrick Kavanagh, and it was printed on the old rough paper. The pieces I always read were ‘Low Life’ by Jeff and ‘High Life’ by Taki Theodoracopulos. Jeff edged it because he wrote about a place I could go to any time: Soho, and The Coach and Horses pub.
I got to know Jeff by going to the pub and waiting for an opportunity to speak to him. The first time I was with my father, a Spectator-reading Guards Armoured Division veteran of Caen and Nijmegen who was good drinking company. Jeff didn’t seem to mind being importuned and I remember a pleasant encounter.
I went back to the Coach a couple of weeks later and tried to have a conversation with Jeff. He turned nasty. He said he was fed up with being accosted by nobodies and told me to fuck off and leave him alone. I got the hump and told him to behave himself. He calmed down and after that he always recognised me and passed the time of day.
I told Jeff I was a Met Police detective and he told me how an officer from Vine Street had arrested him for criminal damage. As they walked past a pub on the way to the station the policeman said he knew that Jeff had slept with the landlord’s daughter. Jeff said he was seriously impressed by the extent of his local knowledge. In 1986, after six years in the east end, I was transferred to Vine Street. The cop who’d arrested Jeff was still there and he confirmed the story.
Vine Street wasn’t that busy and I often went to the Coach for a couple of lunchtime beers. I got to know other Coach habitués: Gordon Smith, the stage manager at the Prince Edward Theatre, the left-wing firebrand Conan Nicholas, Bill Mitchell (‘The Man in Black’ – a Canadian actor with a deep voice who was in loads of TV and radio adverts) and of course, Norman Balon.
I knew that Private Eye held its famous lunches in the pub’s upstairs room, and the story that had made Norman’s reputation as the rudest pub landlord in London. A Labour MP, invited to an Eye lunch, had interrupted Norman, who was on the phone. Norman told him to fuck off.
My Norman story? We got a message that a man had been arrested for theft on a Vine Street warrant. It turned out he’d been a barman at the Coach, stolen a few hundred quid from the till and done a bunk. I went down to give Norman the good news. He laughed mirthlessly and bought me the only drink I ever got off him.
I met Tom Baker and Dick West. Dick wrote articles about South Africa, where I grew up. He told me how the Bureau of State Security had once threatened to arrest him for a piece about corruption in the apartheid government. Jeff introduced me to the great Taki himself. One evening someone pointed out the improbably youthful new editor of Private Eye. The Coach enchanted me.
I was engaged at that time and I introduced my intended to Jeff. He invited us to his upcoming birthday celebration, a Sunday lunch at his flat in Great Portland Street – ‘The Great Portland Street Academy for Young Ladies.’
We lived above my fiancé’s sandwich bar in the city. We dressed up and took a cab to Jeff’s place. Now I remember only Jeff’s brother Bruce, Alice Thomas Ellis and her husband Colin Haycraft, and the dislocating image of Jeff standing at his cooker, stirring flour into the roux for the gravy.
I introduced to Jeff a friend who worked at New Scotland Yard. Jeff liked our tales of derring-do and had a fascination for gory murders and sudden deaths, revealing a genuine and affecting fear that he would die alone. He mentioned us both in his column (not by name, but still, there’s immortality) and asked if we could get him a trip to the Black Museum. Even then, this was not easy to arrange, but my pal said he could oblige.
Jeff turned up in a fragile condition and my friend rather uneasily handed him over to the museum curator. A short while later the curator rang to say Jeff was having a funny turn and that he was to come and take him away. My mate took Jeff into the bar in the basement of the Commissioner’s Office and poured vodka into him until he had recovered enough for the trip back to the Coach.
In 1986 the CID office at Vine Street held its Christmas party at the dingy Regent Palace Hotel near Piccadilly Circus. We all set out to invite the louche characters, pretty women and pub landlords that would make it a successful bash. I invited Jeff.
He didn’t let me down. He turned up pissed, charmed everyone and stayed late. The next morning, he rang our office and asked if anyone had reported the loss of a Crombie overcoat that he’d picked by mistake when he left. My colleague listened to his story. “Does the Crombie fit you?” he asked. Jeff said it did. “You’ve had a result then. Merry Christmas,” said my mate. I fantasised that a senior detective had shrugged himself into what he thought was his Crombie and found himself in Jeff’s Senior Service fag-scented British Warm.
One day in the Coach Jeff told me he was running a small book in the pub and asked whether it would get him into trouble if he got caught. I assured him it would. Shortly thereafter, Jeff took a bet from a customs officer. They swooped on the pub and arrested him. It kept him in copy for weeks. Tom Baker told him a smart appearance was essential for an acquittal and bought him a new shirt and tie for his big day.
Jeff’s fame really increased after Keith Waterhouse wrote his play about him. I saw it in its first run at the Old Vic, with Peter O’Toole on a stage set that looked just like the bar of the Coach.
Jeff chronicled Soho as it became known for dirty bookshops and corrupt police, when villains and hard men would fight in its streets and if the cops came, not much paperwork got done. He still loved it when he was out of his time and Soho was changed by property development and gentrification.
Thinking about him now connects me to a happy time when being a cop in London seemed like the best job in the world. It was a simpler time, when I could start an investigation one day and arrest someone the next, without having to put the thing to a committee.
But I sometimes thought that Jeff longed for an idyll away from the grime of Soho. After he saw my fly rod, he told me he’d never caught a fish and asked me what it was like. I said it was delightful. He asked whether I ate my trout. I said I did and that wild brown trout were delicious. He made me promise to take him to some place where we could catch and eat a trout. I never kept my promise. Mind you, he once promised to take me to the Colony Room “to complete my Soho education” and we never did that either.
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