With these popular paperback ‘lowdown’ guides to London the trick is to date them without looking at the title page or other publishing information. What is needed is a perfunctory whiz through some of the contents and then a guess. I guessed at 1968. It turned out that it came out in 1966, when its well informed editor was in his twenties. I say ‘well-informed’ but ‘Oonter ‘ Davies ( as Private Eye dubbed him) does call on a long list of specialist contributors, including such household names as Dominic Behan, David Benedictus, Chaim Bermant, John Betjeman, Anthony Blond, Quentin Crewe, Maureen Duffy, Martin Green, Tim Heald, Michael Horowitz, George Mikes, Philip O’ Connor, Jonathan Routh, and a few less well known writers.
One party game might be to identify who wrote what. Some are pretty easy. John Betjeman almost certainly wrote on London churches. I would guess that the surrealist poet Philip O’Connor wrote the chapter on the Underworld or Down and Out, mainly because he was down and out for most of his chaotic life. Dominic Behan, brother of Brendan and an active IRA supporter as well as a prolific songwriter and playwright, probably contributed the bit on Irish London and possibly some of the material on pubs, since he liked a pint or three. Jonathan Routh, humorist, prankster and the man behind the British version of ‘ Candid Camera’ , could have written on a number of subjects, but it’s possible that he wrote on ‘ homosexual London’, since he published several little books on the subject of the best loos. His first book on this subject is actually mentioned under ‘ Lavatories ‘ on page 147. Chaim Bermant must surely have written the very scholarly piece on Jewish London and may have contributed to other chapters. The highly successful publisher Anthony Blond , a bon viveur who lost his exhibition to New College Oxford through his over indulgence in ‘ the joys of drink, people, parties, fancy waistcoats, foreign travel and falling in love—mostly with young men ‘ could have contributed to the chapters on restaurants and night clubs, but may also, as a bisexual, have been the author of the piece on homosexual London, which shows a very sympathetic view towards the plight of gay men just before homosexual relations were made legal in 1967
It’s very likely that Quentin Crewe, like Blond, a product of Eton, who became an esteemed writer on food, wrote most of the chapter on restaurants, especially as he had a reputation for writing very candidly on the subject. Interestingly, he had been diagnosed with muscular dystrophy at the age of six and wasn’t expected to live beyond sixteen. At twenty-nine he ended up in a wheelchair, which must have been a problem if he’d ever wished to be a secret diner. David Benedictus ( 1938 – 2023), yet another old Etonian, had published three well received novels when Davies invited him to contribute. His debut, The Fourth Of June, was adapted for the stage, while his second, You’re a Big Boy Now was made into a film by Francis Ford Coppola in 1966, though the setting was changed from London to New York City. Hunter Davies was undoubtedly impressed by the novel, which was described by Robert Spector in The San Francisco Examiner as ‘an outrageously funny satire that launches an all-out nuclear attack on every last inch of British life “. Particular targets include the Welfare State and ‘ upper middle-class snobbishness’, with the ‘blast area’ consisting of sex. Spector compared Bernard, the hero, to Holden Caulfield, the anti hero of The Catcher in the Rye. As Benedictus later wrote books on antique collecting and junk, it’s very likely that he contributed the chapter on junk stalls, though again, like many of the other contributors, his range of interests was wide.
Of the three female contributors, the best known is Maureen Duffy , gay poet, novelist and playwright whose fiction in the early sixties was pioneering in its exploration of female sexuality. Undoubtedly Duffy contributed the chapter on Lesbian London. In it she focuses on the famous Gateways Club in Chelsea, which had been established in the thirties. Duffy was herself an active member and her very honest and moving account of its clientele remains an important document of LGBT history. It is hard to identify what material the writer, editor and publisher Martin Green ( 1932 – 2015) contributed to The New London Spy. Coming from a radical tradition ( his parents fought in the International Brigades in Spain).He was schooled at A. S. Neill’s infamous experimental school Summerhill at Leiston, Suffolk, and at nineteen co-founded the literary periodical Nimbus before joining publisher McGibbin, which brought out Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction. He then formed with two others, a company that published Flann O’Brien, Hugh MacDiarmid, Francis Stuart, Colin Macinnes, Robert Graves and Paul Potts. With Tony White Green wrote his Guide to London Pubs ( 1965), so it is extremely likely that he contributed the very entertaining and witty chapter on London Pubs.
Tim Heald (1944 – 2016 ), a product of Sherborne School and Balliol, was a journalist when he was invited to write for The New London Spy. Later on he began writing crime fiction, published several royal biographies as well as biographies of famous cricketers. However, as cricket and royalty do not figure prominently in Davies’ compendium ( the editor grew up on a council estate and developed his love of football from an early age ), it is possible that the posh Heald was asked to contribute stuff on yachts, Hurlingham, partridge shooting and the like, to the ‘Almanac’, which opens the book. It is interesting to note that Heald followed Davies by editing his own guide to eighties London with The Newest London Spy (1989).
To be continued…
R. M. Healey