I visited The Wheatsheaf as part of my walking and drinking tour of Fitzrovia that took place on Saturday 19 October 2013. Click here to see the photos I took. We tried to evoke the spirit of Julian Maclaren-Ross and Patrick Hamilton, amongst others.

 

This is the exact spot where Julian Maclaren-Ross held court for so many years in The Wheatsheaf pub...

 

 

One of the great services Julian Maclaren-Ross renders in his best-known book,Memoirs of the Forties, is to grant life to occupants of his world beyond the numerous noted writers and artists of his acquaintance. So along with Dylan Thomas, Cyril Connolly and Graham Greene, he lends forgotten characters a substance and complexity which elevate them from bit-player status. His sense of colour, back story and telling details are all illustrated in this excerpt, in which describes one of his fellow regulars at the The Wheatsheaf:

 

Curtain-up on the evening was signalled by the arrival on the dot of six of Mrs Stewart, who lived on her old-age pension in one of the tenements at the foot of the alley and was collected by her married daughter towards closing time or when the pub became too noisy. Mrs Stewart was a very small elderly lady dressed in black silk with yellow-white hair and she arrived always carrying two evening papers in which to do the crossword and an alarm-clock to time herself by. She always drank bottled Guinness and having assembled her alarm clock, evening papers, spectacle case, purse, and other properties on the table, sat in front of them on a leather-covered bench which ran along the right-hand wall by the corner of the bar.

It was in this corner, propped up against the wooden partition of the seat, that I stood for many years (though not, as has been said, underneath my own tartan), having displaced from this strategic position a Central European sports writer on a daily picture paper by the simple expedient of arriving each evening earlier than he was able to.

The sports writer was furious and hated me virulently because of this, since for years before my arrival on the scene he’d been able to lean there, wearing a brown porkpie hat and camel hair coat of inferior quality, speaking to few but hoping always that tourists would say: ‘Who is that interesting-looking foreign man over there?’ as he struck a Napoleonic pose and stared superciliously ahead with his pouched eyes through the smoke of a nonchalantly puffed-at cigarette.

Having permanently dislodged him however (for if prevented by business from getting there in time, I would have someone else to hold the corner), it became my duty in turn to keep Mrs Stewart’s place, to pass over the Guinness in exchange for the exact money produced from her purse, and to see that well-intentioned idiots did not try to help her with the crosswords, a thing she hated above all. Great care had to be exercised in offering her a drink, it could only be done by split-second timing when her nightly ration was running low, but she was very proud and from certain people who plonked down heartily before her an open bottle, with the words ‘Have that one on me Ma,’ she would not accept anything at all.

She was spiky and occasionally irascible. Happily she approved of me, but Dylan Thomas and the poetess Anna Wickham she could not stand at any price. Red and Frances shared, originally, her dislike of Dylan, Mona to a lesser extent (luckily, or he wouldn’t have been allowed in), but later when he had begun to broadcast they chanced to hear him on the radio and from then on nothing was too good. Mrs Stewart either didn’t own a set or was perhaps too deaf, for her opinion of Dylan always remained unchanged, despite the attempts of Red and Frances to win her over to what was now their side.

And yet she was no stranger to people of this sort. In Paris as a young woman she lived in Montparnasse where she’d known Pascin, Hemingway and Joyce, also Dennis Corrigan who’d once been my uncle’s partner on the Côte and later hanged himself with his necktie in a prison cell awaiting trial (a paperback thriller called Hangman’s Tie was found lying below the bench from which he’d kicked off).

Corrigan Mrs Stewart had mainly met on the racecourse, but her encounters with the painters and writers had been in the Paris cafés and her stories about them always ended with her saying: ‘And there they were my dear, staggering about just like you and the rest of the young fellows are doing today.’

She was unlike the other old ladies in that she never spoke of the past from a personal angle, so nobody was told what she herself had been doing in Paris at this period. Nina Hamnett, who was better at painting old people than she was with the young, did a superb portrait of her, which for some time after she died hung above the spot where for so long she’d sat, though I don’t know what happened to it in the end.

The death of Mrs Stewart – in the late Forties or early Fifties – marked, as writers of memoirs are fond of saying, the passing of an epoch, and it might have pleased her to know that she’d become a symbolic figure to a whole new generation now no longer young: for there are few former Wheatsheaf habitués whose eyes fail to light up in memory of her name.

 

Julian Maclaren-Ross and Mrs Stewart's spot in The Wheatsheaf...

 

 

It was emotional.

 

Fitzrovia is an interesting corner of London.  It's the area north of Oxford Street; west of Tottenham Court Road; south of Euston Road; and east of Great Portland Street. Fitzrovia, with its pubs and cafes, has always represented a fringe and marginal space within London. It is the drinking culture rather than any discernible aesthetic, political ethic or philosophy that attracted people. It's also home to some great architecture, history and even better pubs. 

 

The area played host to literary greats such as Patrick Hamilton, Julian Maclaren-Ross, Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Quentin Crisp, George Bernard Shaw, Virgina Woolf, Dylan Thomas etc. In addition to the literary titans, other people who lived locally and frequented the local pubs (such as the Fitzroy Tavern and The Wheatsheaf) include Nancy Cunard, Walter Sickert, the Sitwells, Betty May, Graham Greene, Albert Pierrepoint, Tambimuttu, Aleister Crowley, Nina Hamnett, Percy Wyndham Lewis, James Meary, Augustus John, the bookie Prince Monolulu, Arthur Rimbaud, Boy George, John Constable, Whistler, and Paul Verlaine. Some roll call eh?  

 

 

Previously known as North Soho, the area became known as Fitzrovia in 1940 when the William Hickey gossip column, in the Daily Express, described the Bohemian set that hung out at The Fitzroy Tavern pub as "Fitzrovians".  Fitzrovia soon became used to describe the whole area.  As an aside, in the early 21st century, property developers Candy & Candy tried to rebrand the area as "Noho" via a proposed development on the site of the old Middlesex Hospital although, finally, lack of funds meant it never happened and that appears to have put paid to the new name.

 

 

Click here to see the photos I took.

 

Here's just a few examples of where Fitzrovia features in literature and popular culture...

 

 

My favourite writer, Patrick Hamilton, published a book in 1929 called "The Midnight Bell".  The title comes from the pub which is the book’s focal point.  Hamilton's hours of sitting, drinking and observing London pub life all contribute to magic of this superb novel.  One of the novel's best scenes takes place in a prostitute's flat in Fitzrovia.  Patrick Hamilton knew this area well.  The interior of the Midnight Bell has a physical resemblance to that of the Fitzroy Tavern (more than any other pub in the area). The Wheatsheaf also offers a close match and Hamilton's description of the publican at the Midnight Bell is likely based on the short, plump spinster Mona Glendenning, and Redvers, her similarly rotund brother, and his wife Frances.

 

 

X Trapnel, the libertine author in Anthony Powell's "A Dance To The Music Of Time" is based on the impecunious and thirsty bohemian writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, even down to the sunglasses and walking stick. Maclaren-Ross was most relentless of the Fitzrovian monologists, and - for me - is the ultimate Fitzrovian.

 

Jah Wobble and Bill Sharpe released a jazz album in 2013 called "Kingdom of Fitzrovia" that pays tribute to the area's artistic past (not usually my sort of thang but, well it's referencing Fitzrovia so I gave it a chance and, y'know what, it's the acceptable face of jazz funk and, call it auto suggestion if you will, but it does have a bit of a Fitzrovian vibe).

 

Fitzrovia: London's Bohemia by Michael Bakewell is a compact, 63 page book, published by the (wonderful) National Portrait Gallery in London that uses images from the gallery's collection, and other sources, and contains a three page profile of various Fitzrovia luminaries.

Fitzrovia is a neighbourhood in central London, near London's West End. The area has bohemian associations and was once home to artists, poets and writers, most notably in the first half of the twentieth century. Tom Driberg named the area after The Fitzroy Tavern - the meeting place of the London bohemians. Customers included Albert Pierrepoint, Aleister Crowley, and Prince Monolulu.

This book contains short profiles of, amongst others, Nancy Cunard, Walter Sickert, the Sitwells, Betty May, Dylan Thomas, George Orwell, Tambimuttu, Julian Maclaren Ross, Aleister Crowley, Nina Hamnett, Percy Wyndham Lewis, James Meary, and Augustus John.

I bought the book to help illustrate a a walking tour of Fitzrovia. I wanted something portable to show the two friends who are less aware of the neighbourhood's illustrious and colourful past. The short profiles bring each character alive. For example, Nina Hamnett, Fitzrovia's most notorious inhabitant, who in later life misconstrued an affectionate radio portrait as a grotesque caricature, and subsequently threw herself, or drunkenly fell, off her balcony. Or writer Julian Maclaren-Ross, who only worked once the pubs had shut, and who was known, at The Wheatsheaf, amongst other watering holes as the most relentless of the Fitzrovian monologists.

The book contains a bibliography of further reading for readers who are curious to find out more. My own recommendation is Paul Willetts's biography of Julian Maclaren-Ross "Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia".

I loved this biography of the English writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64). Maclaren-Ross is synonymous with the bohemian world of mid-twentieth-century Soho, and whilst this features extensively in this book, the biography offers plenty more besides. If you're interested in the literary history of the 1930 and 1940s, World War 2, and London (and specifically Soho), then I feel confident you'll enjoy this biography.

During his lifetime he appears to have produced a substantial and astonishingly diverse body of writing. He was usually motivated by a chronic lack of cash. Like many of his generation and class he enjoyed an affluent and comfortable middle-class Edwardian upbringing, only to discover the family money was gone by the 1930s. What money he made seemed to be spent almost immediately, frequently in Soho hostelries. The constant need for cash meant when he wasn't holding court in a pub he was writing. All of this made for a turbulent and interesting life. Paul Willetts describes him as a "mediocre caretaker of his own immense talent". That seems to sum up his self-destructive life.

I would add that this biography was a follow up to the five Patrick Hamilton novels and Patrick Hamilton biography that I completed before reading this book. This biography followed on beautifully, although I was disappointed to learn that the two never appear to have met.

After finishing this biography I was inspired to buy his "Memoirs of the Forties"; "Selected Stories"; and "Of Love And Hunger". If they're half as good as this biography I'll be in for a treat.