The Tottenham, Soho

I was 7 when my Mum and Dad decided to take the pub route to earn a living. This was 1953.

My parents trained in The Tottenham in Oxford Street, close to Soho. My Dad was a musician and, pre-war, had a dance band, ‘Ro Lee and the Beachcombers’. He was a pianist. To earn extra money after the war, he played in pubs.

My Dad could play any instrument, and he had several: Especially an accordion which went to war with him. He would get a tune out of anything; you should have heard him play the harmonica! But his favourite was the piano. 

Every weekend would see him travelling up to The Tottenham to play and sing. Mum would sometimes go too, just to be with Dad, really. After a few weeks, Jack Diss, who ran the pub, asked Mum if she would like a job behind the bar while Dad played, so that was that. Jack became a family friend, and my brothers and I would often go to the pub at the weekend and play upstairs in the enormous flat with Jack’s son Anthony. 

Mum was a trained dancer and sang too, so along with Dad, they were both a bit showbiz with big personalities and plenty of charisma. 

The customers loved them.

I think it must have been about a year that they worked there and they left in 1954.  

Dad was a master signwriter and worked for the family business, Markham and Sons, from a young age. Before the war, it was a thriving and lucrative business: if you ever saw Fry’s Five Boys painted on a wall or building, it was my Dad who climbed a ladder and put them up there, along with many other advertisements, all of which were painted by hand – I like to think of him as the Banksy of the 50s.. His signwriting skills did come back into play years later in one of the pubs we had that needed restoration. When the neon electric signs that became popular in the 50s, a lot of the smaller signwriting businesses went bust. My Grandad was still at the helm but the signwriting trade, with all its skills, was fading fast. 

Jack offered to train Mum and Dad and teach Dad the trade, such as cellar work and accounting.. So my parents took the plunge, had interviews with Whitbread’s and before we knew it, we were moving to our first pub in Battersea, The Duke of Edinburgh.

The Tottenham is now called The Flying Horse. It’s the only pub left on Oxford Street. It is quite beautiful, a visually striking nineteenth-century Grade II-listed building, so there is no danger of demolition; hopefully, it will remain a public house. 

The pub is on the Campaign for Real Ale's National Inventory of Historic Pub Interiors.

Strict licensing laws in those days meant children could not go into the bar. You had to be 14 years old and with an adult, and even then, you could not go to the bar and, of course, could only drink soft drinks! But people didn’t take their children to pubs in those days. If they did, they left them outside, sitting on the pavement with a bottle of pop and a bag of crisps! 

When we went to The Tottenham, we would be rushed inside and upstairs to the flat. 

I remember vaguely how huge and dusty the flat was. Lots of rooms. Publicans didn't have a reputation for clean and smart living accommodation. Their life was the pub, and they worked very hard to keep everything tip-top in the bars, so no time for life upstairs, just a place to sleep and eat.  

Time off was unheard of. With luck, a landlord might get half a day a week off, but usually on his own; the landlady had a different day off. Pubs had to have one of the licensees present at closing time. To go away together was very problematic. We had to hire relief managers, leave the flat for them to live in and hope when we returned, we still had our customers, a full cellar and some money in the till. Some relief managers were known to have light fingers. Our toys often went missing, I do remember that. Even though inventories would have taken place, somehow a few bottles of this and that would have been ‘accidentally smashed’ and, oh dear, there was a leak in a faulty barrel, or damp had got into the packets of cigarettes. Eventually, we didn’t go away together. It became oo expensive. As children, my Aunt and Uncle took us away with them and sometimes, we would spend school holidays with relatives in Suffolk who had a farm. A few days away with Mum or Dad was very rare. But we did go to the theatre a lot with one or another of them when we were in the London pubs.

I loved Sundays as Sunday opening hours gave a family a few extra hours together.

My Dad would call us at about 8 am, and my brothers and I would go down to the bar and help bottle up, cleaning the bottles as we went and placing all the labels at the front. My older brother would do some cellar work with Dad. Cleaning the pipes that fed the beer up to the bars. My younger brother and I would be at the ready with the buckets: a shout from Dad, and we would pull the pumps and clear all the soapy water into these buckets. It took ages and lots of bucket-emptying before all the soap disappeared and the water ran clear. Then Dad fed a chemical through the pipes, and we again pulled the pumps to clear that. It had a bleach smell that I remember very well. We would then go down to the cellar and help with hosing down the cellar walls and floor. Sometimes Dad would unlock the spirit cage, and we would go in and clean and sort all the bottles.  

Every pub we lived in had similar cellars: cold, dark, damp and a bit scary. But we reckoned our Dad’s cellars were the cleanest in London. He took pride in them, and cellar work, such as tapping the barrels and putting a lighted candle under the stout barrel, it was a skill. In those days, people knew pubs for their beer and which venue served the best bitter, mild or whatever drink it was. No pressurised pumps in those days. No lager either. Bottled beer was mostly light ale, brown ale or stout.  

Customers often had a mix, like light and bitter: half a pint of bitter, usually one pull on the pump, if you were skilful, went into a pint glass, followed by a bottle of light ale. The pulling of the half pint would be watched keenly buy the customer, so, an extra little pull on the pump would convince them they had a true measure or more.

Customers quite often had their preferences as to whether they wanted their beer served in a straight glass or a jug. Woe betide if you didn’t remember. They would sometimes bring their tankards which we would leave on hooks behind the bar. 

People mostly drank spirits on the weekends, Saturday nights. That’s when the women would come along with their husbands. Whole families would descend on the Saloon Bar, each having their own table and dressed in posh weekend clothes. There was always a party atmosphere where Dad would play the piano, and the customers sang all the old songs. One pub Dad had, had room for a small dais and mic. Long before karaoke came along, the customers would volunteer to sing, and they all had their own song. Somehow it didn’t matter what their voices were like because, Dad had a knack for accompanying them on the piano and making them all sound wonderful. One customer, Albert, had a small drum he would set up and use those drum brushes to give things a bit of a swing. I’m not at all sure Dad appreciated his drumming skills. But, as the saying goes, ‘the customer is always right’. In this particular pub, on Tuesday evenings, usually a quiet time, Dad would host jam sessions for any musicians that wanted to come along. He knew lots of people from his band days, and many of his old friends would turn up to play. Tuesday evenings were music nights. It was super.  

During the week, the men usually drank beer in the public bar where the drinks were cheaper. In the 50s and 60s, you would rarely see a woman in a bar during the week, and never unaccompanied, unless it was a quick shout from the door for a packet of cigarettes or bottle of stout or sherry as off-sales. Off-sales had a different price as they were not consumed on the premises. Oh, the laws were so different then.  

After the cellar work on the Sunday mornings, Dad would cook breakfast, and we would sit down together. My Grandparents always lived with us, so there was quite a crowd around that table, especially if we had the odd barman living in or maybe our school pals.

After breakfast, Mum would get out all the little glass bowls that we would fill with cubes of cheese, crackers, gherkins and nuts. These would always be on the bar on Sunday mornings, along with cut-up salted roast potatoes that would smell so delicious. Depending on which pub we were in, there might be seafood too, Dad having gone to Tubby Isaac’s fish stall in Aldgate early that morning.

The pubs opened from 12-2 on Sunday afternoons and 7-10 in the evening. The Sunday morning session was always very busy. It was also the one session my Mum never worked. She would have a lie-in and then tackle the roast dinner.

In the summer, after we closed the morning session and following the roast dinner, we would all pile into two cars and head for one of the parks or maybe Epping Forest, depending on our location. There we would have a picnic, maybe a swim. Winter would see us at a museum or exhibition of some sort. Family time, as it’s called today. Lovely. 

Mum and Dad tried to give us as normal a time as they could when we were young, and I must say that having run a pub myself, I have no idea how they found the energy to give us such wonderful Sundays: all I wanted to do after closing time was put my feet up or soak in a hot bath! This was when I used to run Dad’s pub, the Ten Bells in Leeds village, Kent, twice a year so he could go away on holiday. I loved it but only for a week at a time!