Tisbury Court

TISBURY COURT


As anyone who knows me can tell you, a good deal of tolerance is required to enjoy my company and as yet I’ve not found another corner of the world that has done it as successfully as Soho.

I am a half Indian, half English, flat- footed, short sighted, vegetarian son of a lesbian mother and grandson of a circus midget. All true, although I am reliably informed that there is still hope for my feet.

So it is little wonder then that I should feel at home in what is basically a 24-hour carnival of the grotesque where anything and ‘anyone’ goes. Around these parts, you’re doing well if you belong to more than one minority group. I think it would be a real tragedy if that were to ever change; it’s the best thing about the place and it is almost single-handedly responsible for providing a home where a gay community could flourish in this country.

And flourish it has!

The area of Soho that is largely made up of Gay bars and clubs was very different when I first moved here. Rupert Street, Brewer and Archer Street had a much heavier atmosphere that could scare you. But no other street was scarier than Tisbury Court.

As I mentioned earlier: “If you don’t have a purpose when you come to Soho, it will find one for you”. Tisbury Court has been full of characters to help bring that phrase into the harsh reality of day. Your average Soho tourist (you know, the ones who live in Hampstead and Notting Hill) would no doubt name all of these characters as ‘drug dealers’ but in fact, they are much more colourful than that. One of my favourites was a chap called Lewis from Malta who I worked with when I was cheffing for a while in Great Windmill Street. He left the restaurant to do full time ‘touting’, i.e. bringing people to the places they were looking for and taking a cut of the door price from the establishment in question.

I think he was in his early fifties. He did very well at that time and made enough money to pay for a little mews flat in Paddington and support his mother in Malta. He had some fabulous outfits. He always wore Cuban heels and pin stripe suits that looked like ‘40’s originals. He smoked cigars and if you had never been to Soho before and you saw him you’d feel that there was a man you could trust who would guide you to the right place.

He often brought people to ‘the right place’, which was usually an illegal drinking bar that stayed open all night where you could meet people from every walk of life and even get yourself in to trouble if you wanted. Although I remember during those days that everyone really got on with each other and no one wanted to spoil the party. The Basement Bar on Archer Street was a favourite but by the mid nineties we used to get raided by the police at least twice a week until it was shut down in 1998.

When I worked as a chef/doorman/waiter at Café Bar Sicilia on Great Windmill Street there were many occasions that we were raided by the police but we were never shut down and I still don’t know why. I remember one night in particular, probably a Friday or Saturday night, J, the boss, was literally carrying lost couples in off the street into our den of iniquity, screaming as he went: “Bar open! If you don’t like the food don’t pay!” The restaurant itself only held up to 60 people at a push but there would be people sitting on the stairs on the way up to the toilets doing God knows what. Every time J brought new people in he would ask them their names and be sure to introduce himself in a very clear and loud voice. I always thought it was strange, until the night we were raided. The police knocked open the door demanding that the manager of the bar come forward. The bar had never had an alcohol license (we used to buy in all our wine, beer and spirits from ‘Rupert Stores’ and ‘Somerfield’). The Chief Inspector told J that he was under arrest. I was 19 at the time and I clearly remember standing at the back of the restaurant by the kitchen door where I had been making pizza for hungry drunkards, clutching my pizza spade, thinking that I was about to go to jail. J just started laughing and said in his thick Maltese accent ‘Come on Gov, this is a private party, have a Grappa!’ The officer asked him who were the fifty odd people who occupied the restaurant and added sarcastically “I suppose they’re all friends of yours?” to which Jreplied “Of course’. The officer started asking J to shout out the names of all his ‘Friends’. To everyone’s amazement he named every single person in the bar correctly and then added “the only person I don’t know in here officer…is you!’ Everybody was laughing by this point and I had been ordered to make a Margarita with extra pepperoni to take away for J’s new friend ‘The Chief Inspector’.

J was a wonderful character and I loved him dearly, even if he did lead me down some very dodgy paths. He should have been in show business really, the finest entertainer I have ever seen managing a bar. There was something incredibly magnetic about him. I remember when Jack and I used to open the bar at midday and sit around maybe making a couple of pizzas for a pair of tourists who had strayed off from Leicester Square, but that would be it, it was empty all day. But the second that J appeared, things would change. We would invariably be playing ‘catch’ in the kitchen with various Mediterranean fruits, when all of a sudden we could hear the music. The Theme from The Godfather was blaring out of the stereo and there was the sound of J’s boots trotting around the restaurant above our heads. It was always a spooky moment because we never knew what mood he was in. It was usual for him to come down to the kitchen and start picking up parsley and shoving it on top of the meals we were preparing. Quite irritating but extremely funny. But whatever mood he was in, one thing was consistent, as soon as he arrived the orders started pouring in and a party would be beginning above us. When we finished at midnight, we would rise to the restaurant and go straight to the bar. We never had to pay for any booze, which was excellent training for the industry we would soon be moving over to…

That bar was very special to me and a lot of things happened to me whilst I worked there. It’s where I was when my first manager told me that Sony were offering my band a record deal. It’s where I used to take all the exciting ‘pop’ people I met when I was with Sony and it’s where I went back to work after tasting the high life for a few years when the Sony deal ended. I also learnt how to cook Italian/Sicilian cuisine, wait on tables and learnt a little Maltese. It’s also the place that I fell in love in, became an expert on Frank Sinatra, Al Pacino and get to see drunk millionaires spend a grand on spirits.

The best thing about it though, was getting to know good people who had nothing in common other than being ‘good people’, straight, gay, black, white, rich, poor, educated, streetwise, innocent, guilty. It was like a secret society of people who you knew never saw each other in the daytime. Nobody was interested in judging anyone else, sober or intoxicated, it made no difference. Sorry to quote Jerry Herman but ‘They were what they were’. I’m sure it’s somewhat romanticised in my mind (and why not? I love romance) but it really is not like that these days. Like religion and other so called ‘institutions’, whatever brilliance there was to be found in it got diluted and disappeared when it became ‘popular’.

It is much safer, in this area now, I will say that. But it’s really becoming a challenge to find the interesting characters that used to reign supreme around here. I have a feeling it’s turning around again though…


© TIM ARNOLD 2006