Soho in the Eighties by Christopher Howse

Author:Christopher Howse [Howse, Christopher]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, History, Non-Fiction, Personal Memoirs, Popular Culture, Social History, Social Science
ISBN: 9781472914811
Google: YPpoDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1472914805
Publisher: Bloomsbury Continuum
Published: 2018-09-05T23:00:00+00:00

‘I’ve lost all my money’

He knew it was time to move on. It was out of the frying pan into the fire. The rapid failure of his music-hall pub, the Watermans Arms, lost him perhaps £30,000, enough in 1963 to buy a row of houses. That was why in the eighties he was living in Devon, having moved to his parents’ house near the sea.

Over a decade or so, everything movable that could be sold had to be sold: the best of the furniture, a signed lithograph by Sutherland of Somerset Maugham’s head, a surgeon’s head by Bacon, two Auerbachs and a Freud portrait of John Deakin. He missed most of all a Gaudier-Brzeska sketch of a tiger, which he remembered gazing at as a child in his grandmother’s house.

At last the house, too, had to be sold and, though still in Devon, he was living in a smaller cottage in narrow Irsha Street, Appledore, with a dilapidated boathouse next to it at the water’s edge. He lived with the younger Peter Bradshaw, whom I remember in London as silent and greasy-haired. Peter’s girlfriend ran off with a fisherman, but he found another who stayed true to him till he died just after the eighties ended.

Even though money was draining away, Daniel refused to attenuate his generosity. In 1987 he launched his book of reminiscences and photographs, Soho in the Fifties, with a party at Kettner’s for about a hundred people – many of them old Soho hands with a vast capacity for the wine and spirits freely available. Francis Bacon had come, and Bruce Bernard. Tweedy, pony-tailed Garech Browne, the co-founder of Claddagh Records, was over from Ireland. Graham Mason had kept sober enough to climb the stairs. Ian Board had clambered down from the Colony and Norman Balon had beetled over from the Coach. Sandy Fawkes and Laurie Doyle came together. I spotted Auberon Waugh, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Christopher Silvester, Candida Crewe and Fred Ingrams all shouting to make themselves heard in the crowd. Barney Bates played the piano. The next day I met Daniel in the Colony and told him how much I had enjoyed his party. He replied: ‘Oh, were you there?’

Daniel Farson hated the two motive forces of his life most obviously on show in Soho: alcoholism and homosexuality. ‘I have always been a lousy drunk,’ he admitted, ‘wild, euphoric and abusive after that beautiful preamble.’ His reference to the ‘taint’ of homosexuality did not keep him closeted in shame. One day in 1987, he came into the Coach and Horses, followed by a brown young man who looked like a rent boy. That is what he turned out to be.

Daniel said: ‘What would you like to drink?’

He replied: ‘A gin and tonic – just a small one ’cos I’m driving.’

‘But I thought you were staying with me.’

‘Oh, I am.’

‘I’ll have to get some money, because I’ve lost all my money.’ Daniel’s voice was thick. He was very drunk. He took out his change and put it on the counter.

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