Tales From The Colony Room: Soho’s Lost Bohemia
Darren Coffield
Unbound £25
There is something timeless about bars crammed with heavy drinkers. ‘They were talking drunk, and confidential drunk, and laughing drunk, and beautifully drunk, and leering drunk, and secretive drunk, and dignified drunk, and admittedly drunk, and fighting drunk, and even rolling drunk.’
This is how the great novelist of drunkenness, Patrick Hamilton, chose to describe a London dive, The Midnight Bell, nearly 100 years ago, back in 1929.
That passage reminds me strongly of Soho’s Colony Room Club, which opened 20 years later, in 1948, and went on for 60 years, eventually closing in 2008, having served its purpose.
Cheers: The Colony as recalled by Mail on Sunday cartoonist Michael Heath, who features in the book
Its principal attraction was that it was open in the afternoons, when ordinary pubs were obliged to close. This meant that seasoned drinkers, already tanked up after lunchtime drinking elsewhere in Soho, could stumble along Dean Street, through a grubby entrance, up a narrow staircase and into the cramped, smoke-filled room that was the Colony.
It was an interesting and alluring place, though neither so interesting nor so alluring as the author of this beautifully produced elegy suggests.
In his foreword, Barry Humphries remembers it from his youth as ‘a wonderful discovery’. For him, ‘it provided an atmosphere of delectable depravity for the select company of alcoholics and would-be artists’. It was run by a razor-tongued woman called Muriel Belcher and her assistant Ian Board, who took over when she died. ‘What did that ogress and her malevolent elf Ian use to entice us to that infernal club?’ asks Humphries. ‘As she grew even uglier and he transformed from lah-de-dah rent boy to a booze-bitten queen with a strawberry nose, we still climbed those fateful stairs.’
Humphries ascribes the attraction of the Colony Room to ‘The Slate’. ‘No one paid. It was the alcoholics’ paradise. You merely ran up a slate. Later, much later, came the reckoning, but you never knew how they arrived at the astronomical total, and alkies like to pay more anyway.’
Was the Colony Room really any different from any other drinking den, in Manchester, or Dublin, or Chicago, or from the pages of Patrick Hamilton? The author, Darren Coffield, a one-time habitué, thinks it was. To support his case, he has dug up lost interviews and produced a long – frankly, over-long – oral history, in which a variety of regulars, many now dead, ramble on about its particular appeal.
‘There were no ordinary people there, only extraordinary people,’ states one regular, while another rattles on about how ‘the conversation was so vital and witty’.
Alas, alcohol is the enemy of memory, and though many old members airily expound on the club as a hub of wit and vitality, the examples they have to offer are notably thin on the ground.
One regular maintains that the club’s second proprietor, Ian Board, was ‘verbally agile, a vigorous persecutor of bores and a tremendous raconteur’ but he offers no examples of his repartee, other than a string of swear words punctuated by ‘bore’. Of the actor John Hurt, Board is quoted as saying, ‘That twit. I hate him… One day, he went on and on for about half an hour, boring the b***** a*** off me – there’s nothing more boring than a bore. So I said, “Francis Bacon told me you’re the most boring person in the world.” ’ It’s a far cry from Oscar Wilde.
The genial jazz singer George Melly, another regular, shared my scepticism about Ian Board. ‘What he lacked was Muriel’s wit. Ian would sometimes be reduced to incomprehensible swearing at people – “Shut your cakehole, you boring dreary f**t!”’
Over and over again, those interviewed say that bores were shown the door: ‘The only unforgivable sin in the club was to be boring.’ Yet my own experience as a member of the Colony in the early 1980s suggests that the proportion of bores was roughly on a par with the population as a whole – perhaps greater, given that alcohol taken in vast quantities deadens the brain. Board himself had a grotesque charisma, and, like many drunks, a radar for an Achilles heel, but he had the verbal agility of a newt.
Proprietor Ian Board with Jeffrey Bernard. Many Colony lives were squandered in drink, and ended in tears, or in smoke
Coffield reminisces about members who ‘drank, caroused, gossiped and entertained one another with their anecdotes, which in turn sometimes gave rise to mythical events that never happened, such as the poet Dylan Thomas throwing up over the Colony Room carpet’. It’s odd to think of generations of members entertaining each other with a tale of Dylan Thomas throwing up; odder still to think that, wherever he might have thrown up, it was never over the Colony Room carpet.
This anecdote, or non-anecdote, demonstrates Coffield’s weakness for celebrity. Had any old drunk thrown up, or not thrown up, then it would never have rated a mention, but Dylan Thomas’s fame guarantees him a place in the book, regardless.
‘Along the way,’ trumpets the blurb, ‘you’ll be served a drink by James Bond, sip champagne with Francis Bacon, queue for the loo with Christine Keeler, go racing with Jeffrey Bernard, get laid with Lucian Freud, kill time with Doctor Who, pick a fight with Frank Norman and pass out with Peter Langan.’
It is indeed true that the membership of the Colony contained the cream of Soho bohemia. In my time there, I encountered all those figures, except for Lucian Freud, who had abandoned it by then, and James Bond – Daniel Craig – who was a member after my time. It was, of course, exciting to bump into Christine Keeler, but many of the famous regulars, not least the drunken journalist Jeffrey Bernard, were much less entertaining in the flesh than in print or on stage.
In Tales From The Colony Room, The Mail on Sunday’s great cartoonist Michael Heath – one of the sharpest chroniclers of London life – recalls the period during which Jeffrey Bernard was played on stage by the infinitely more glamorous Peter O’Toole. ‘Such was Jeffrey’s vanity, he’d sit in the theatre bar during the performances, waiting for people to come out at the interval and buy him a drink. One night there was a new doorman who refused to let him in. “Do you know who I am? I am Jeffrey Bernard!” The doorman waved him away – “No, you’re not! He’s on stage.”’
The jewel in the Colony’s crown was the painter Francis Bacon, who was always there in his leather jacket, holding court, dishing out champagne like a witch distributing a potion to her coven. ‘Francis would walk in and within ten minutes the place would be alive.’ The presence of such an obviously successful figure tempted others, less talented, to think that getting legless was a form of creativity.
As Coffield acknowledges, many Colony lives were squandered in drink, and ended in tears, or in smoke. ‘The members’ lifestyle was a form of existential suicide… Several members’ mattresses became impromptu funeral pyres as they went up in flames.’
‘I had to keep away, just to stay alive,’ said the louche writer Molly Parkin. Only the most energetic or ebullient survived: the rest either got out in time, or went down, not waving, but drowning.
‘We thought we were all on “life’s threshold”,’ says Barry Humphries in his foreword, ‘when we were actually at the terminus.’ Coffield remembers taking a student to the Colony Room. The student asked Bacon if he knew any good cure for a hangover. ‘Francis shot him a glance – “Suicide,” he replied.’
Once pubs were allowed to open in the afternoons, the Colony Room lost its purpose. With the death of the old guard, it became a cool destination for pushy young artists and comics who, fuelled by cocaine and ambition, were keen to emulate the legends of their more talented predecessors.
‘A new generation of artists now frequent the club who I suppose are the equivalent of Francis, Lucian and Frank Auerbach in the 1950s,’ declared the last proprietor, Michael Wojas, at the turn of the century, but this was wishful thinking. Wojas died young, of drink and drugs; the others moved on, and, for the most part, survived.
‘I drink to drown my sorrows,’ read the caption for one Michael Heath cartoon in the 1970s, ‘but they’ve learnt how to swim.’