Bo or Italian
1956–1960
In 1956, the city of Hull was shaking off a sense of itself as the ‘north east town’ whose streets and suburbs had been scarred by a devastating wartime bombing campaign, anonymised in news reports and unacknowledged in the country at large. (The ‘D’ Notice prohibiting reporting of the bombing of Hull would remain in place until 1976.) Its docks, industry, proximity to mainland Europe, and location on Luftwaffe flight paths to northern and midlands industrial cities had combined with the rivers Humber and Hull as natural navigational aids to make it the most bombed British city per square mile of the war. There was national recognition of the suffering of people in Coventry and Exeter, London and Liverpool, but not Hull. The city’s own newspaper, the Hull Daily Mail, had been subject to restrictions. Typically, a report on 20 May 1942 told of a ‘Fierce Raid on a North East Town’ in which a number of people were killed and injured when raiders dive-bombed residential areas. The last recorded Luftwaffe raid on the UK to cause casualties came on 17 March 1945 when a Heinkel 111 flew along Holderness Road, opening up with machine guns and dropping fragmentation bombs. Thirteen people were killed and 22 injured. By the end of the war more than 1,200 people had been killed and 3,000 injured. Nearly 95 per cent of the city’s houses were damaged and 152,000 people left homeless. There was deeply held belief among local people that Hull’s suffering had been ignored and now it was being left to dust itself down and carry on.
That it did was, in part, due to a collective spirit of defiance and, more discernibly, a thriving and profitable fishing industry. Hull’s fleet of deep water trawlers landed a third of the fish which ended up on British plates. It took an army of skippers, mates, third hands, deckhands, decky-learners, engineers, cooks and radio operators to bring back the fish for bobbers, filleters, fish merchants and fish-house workers to unload and process. Fish came fresh from ship to dock to the railways and roads and away to customers in a matter of hours. Ships and men had to be maintained, supplied and fed. Fish came in and the city worked.
Fishermen, home briefly between trips, were characterised as ‘three-day millionaires’, earning a reputation as hardened drinkers and gamblers whose limited time ashore was spent in the pubs and clubs of Hessle Road, done up to the nines in tailor-made suits and silk shirts. High living was understandable: with the industry at its peak, the mortality rate for men at sea was several times that of any land-based industry, six times that of coal mining. Men lost fingers, hands, and worse. At sea, first aid was rudimentary at best.
Fishing was a family tradition with fathers, uncles, brothers making a living at sea. In a tragedy which left its mark on the fishing communities, in the winter of 1955, two vessels – the Lorella and the Roderigo – had iced up in severe weather conditions. Clearing the ice was impossible and the ships became top heavy. Both capsized and 40 men lost their lives. However tough the conditions, men still sailed to bring back cod and haddock from fishing grounds close to the Arctic Circle. Rewards could be considerable. Top skippers earned good money for themselves and their crews, gaining reputations on a par with the city’s rugby league and football players.
As Lewis arrived at the Hull College of Arts and Crafts on Anlaby Road, a few miles away the poet, Philip Larkin, who’d arrived in 1955 to take up the post of University Librarian at the University of Hull, had begun work on The Whitsun Weddings, the poem inspired by a train journey from Hull to London the previous year. Interviewed some years later for the BBC’s Monitor arts programme, Larkin said, ‘I never thought about Hull until I was here. Having got here, it suits me in many ways. It is a little on the edge of things.’
The city’s future was beginning to unfold. There were new shops, cinemas, pubs and clubs. Department store Hammonds had recently installed a ‘Picadish’ cafeteria on the third floor where you could take one of the high stools overlooking Ferensway and swing round with a bird’s-eye view over Paragon railway station and the bus station. In his poem, Here, Larkin speaks of a ‘fishy-smelling / Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum / Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarved wives’. For some new arrivals, it might have felt like the end of the line and was certainly a little ‘on the edge of things’, but for Lewis, after Barton it was quite the opposite.
Attendance on the National Diploma of Design course meant leaving Westfield Road at 7 o’clock each morning for the walk to Barton Station and the short train journey to New Holland Pier. From there, Hull was a 30 minute ferry crossing away. If, as sometimes happened, one of the three pre-war paddle steamers grounded on the shifting sandbanks, the journey might take an hour, maybe more. From Hull Corporation Pier, it was a brisk 15 minute walk to the main college building in Anlaby Road.
Before art school, a trip to Hull had been an occasional highlight. Lewis and friends crossed the river to buy records at Gough and Davy and for Saturday trips to the pictures. Downstairs in the ferry bar where licensing laws meant alcohol was served all day, in an atmosphere thick with smoke and the smell of warm Double Diamond and rum, trawler crews who’d docked in Grimsby would make their way home to Hull. One Saturday morning when a group of fishermen came on board, one of whom produced a battered pack of cards, Lewis stood close by as hands of brag were dealt and the men outbid and outbluffed each other. The kitty rose in pound notes – serious money when most local men earned an average three or four pounds a week. Lewis drew closer to the game. At the climax of the hand with a healthy pot on the table, one of the fishermen dropped his cards on the floor. Nick Turner remembers, ‘The fisherman said, “That was an ace wasn’t it?” Quick as a flash, Ted said it was. It wasn’t, but the others folded. He’d taken his life in his hands; if they’d realised he’d lied to help this bloke’s bluff, he’d have got hammered.’
Aside from fishermen and daily commuters, the ferry’s main trade was carrying passengers and goods for Hull Market and daytrippers from the hinterland of Grimsby and Scunthorpe and the villages of northern Lincolnshire. Lewis absorbed the atmosphere, listening intently and picking up on idiosyncrasies of accent, turns of phrase and snatches of overheard conversation. When his classes stretched into the evening, he’d run from college to quayside to make the last ferry home. If there was time and he had a few shillings in his pocket, he’d sink a pint or two in one of the dockside pubs and then perhaps another on the ferry. Nick Turner recalls an evening with Lewis and two girls at the cinema in Hull. Before catching the ferry home, they stopped off for a couple of pints in the Minerva and came out to find a prostitute and her client ‘at it’ up against the pier. ‘He was ramming away, she was still eating her fish and chips. She saw us watching and shouted across, “What’s a matter, love, an’t you ever seen one before?” Ted shouted back, “Yeah, but not big enough to crawl back into.”’
Until now, Barton had defined Lewis, reining in his ambition. Across the water, Hull felt like another country. Art school was the focal point for aspiring musicians, writers and artists working across the city. For Lewis, it was an irreversible step from Harry and Bertha’s best intentions of a white-collar profession. He found himself one of a post-war cohort of like-minded young people from relatively modest backgrounds who, with education, aspiration and self-belief, challenged convention in ways denied their parents’ generation.
Lewis began studying the intermediate level of the NDD, known as the ‘inter’, as well as working for his English A-level, a prerequisite for students of illustration expected to pursue careers in the emerging commercial worlds of graphic design and advertising. He was taught drawing, lettering, typography, painting and illustration with an approach that placed emphasis on ideas and learning how to think independently and creatively. Lettering classes could be exacting, repetitive, but it was a long way from the rote learning of grammar school. Lewis was initially conscientious, thriving in the less regimented system.
The man who came closest to replicating Henry Treece’s influence as artistic mentor, and whose eye for detail and character nuance is central to understanding the development of Lewis as an artist, was William Augustus (Bill) Sillince. Known primarily as a cartoonist, caricaturist and ‘humourist-stylist’, Battersea-born Sillince had come to prominence with his work for Punch magazine, for whom he was appointed art editor in 1937 – a position he retained until the early 1950s. In 1950 he published Comic Drawing, a ‘light-hearted but essentially practical study of the nature, function, and creation of pictorial humour’. In the book, Sillince, who’d studied at Regent Street Polytechnic and Central School of Art then worked in advertising before becoming a freelance artist and cartoonist, set out his philosophy, distinguishing himself and his work from that of satirists and other more politically barbed cartoonists. Self-portrait caricatures which appear in collections of his cartoons show an owlish man with horn-rimmed glasses, an image recognised by Lewis’s art school friends. They recall Sillince teaching by encouragement and anecdote rather than overly formal instruction. His stock-in-trade had been making gentle observation in a series of cartoons, which mocked English stereotypes of stuffy civil servants, military buffers, society girls, pinny-wearing housewives and overweight bureaucrats. Immensely popular collections of his topical wartime cartoons for Punch were published in hardback in We’re All In It (1941); We’re All Still In It (1942); United Notions (1943); Combined Observations (1944); and Minor Relaxations (1945). By and large these are wryly observed morale raisers that bring out the best in his affectionate humour, making subtle points of propaganda. The Yorkshire Post said Sillince had ‘a remarkable knack for snatching the topic of the moment and pinning it down in black and white mirth’; the Observer that he had ‘a sense of humour which, even in these grim days, does not jar’. In a foreword to one of the books, Sillince writes with characteristic understatement that, if his pictures should leave the reader ‘a little brighter than before then the object of my present effort will have been achieved’.
Drawing with 2B and 4B pencils on self-burnished, grained paper, Sillince’s technique softened the image and, as a consequence, tempered any underlying sting of his cartoons. He skilfully conveyed a completeness of story in a single frame, raising a smile from the set of a pompous general’s jaw, implying stoical defiance in the roll of a sleeve on a rolling-pin wielding ‘Mum’ or humanising ‘’Itler’ as a boxer, scrawny, defeated, and throwing in the towel. A window on the wartime world, the books had established Sillince as a firm favourite with readers and students.
Like Sillince, Lewis’s painting tutor, James (Jimmy) Neal, was a Londoner new to Hull. The arrival of two distinguished London tutors may have had something to do with the increased incidence of respiratory illness in the capital at that time. Lewis’s friend, Ron Burnett, recalls both tutors had come to Hull for their health. Many did, particularly in the aftermath of the London smog of December 1952, in which a thick, polluted fog killed thousands of Londoners. For those with asthma or other respiratory problems, the cleaner air from the east coast and Humber estuary was thought to be beneficial.
Neal had trained at Saint Martin’s and the Royal College of Art and brought with him kudos, experience and a refreshing down-to-earth approach to his classes. On his death in October 2011, artist David Sweet wrote in the Guardian how he had ‘told stories about characters he had known, and related facts from the biographies and scandals of artists of the past, particularly obscure, minor artists, to illustrate a point or amplify a comment about a student’s efforts’. In a shakily handwritten note sent in response to enquiries about Lewis in 2009, Neal remembered he ‘was always very tired’. In his mind, there was no doubt the daily travel and attendance at art classes amounted to ‘a very heavy schedule for a young lad’.
For art school students from Hull or the towns and villages of the East Riding, finding their way around French painters’ names was an adventure in itself. Life classes gave them their first experiences of the nude form. Lewis’s classmate, Dick Armstrong, remembers a young female model ‘covered in love bites and elastoplasts’ collapsing as the session drew to a close. ‘It was winter and the girl had been surrounded by electric fires. She’d been standing for some time and the air was thick with cigarette smoke.’ Armstrong, still drawing the girl’s feet, realised her legs were going. ‘I looked up in time to see her collapse, caught her and guided her onto this plinth covered in sheets. The teacher rushed over – you weren’t supposed to touch the naked model and I thought I was in trouble.’ The next morning Lewis greeted Armstrong by asking, did he have his running shoes on?
From the outset, it was clear that Lewis had talent as an illustrator and artist. Tutors and colleagues thought well of his work. But after the initial burst of enthusiasm, he began to coast as he had at school, doing enough and no more, dashing off assignments at the last minute. Away from the classroom, he immersed himself in a thriving social scene. With the college building sandwiched between the Tower Cinema on one side and the Regent Cinema opposite, the temptation to skip classes was irresistible. Sometimes the art school crowd would go en masse when classes finished at six o’clock. But Lewis would already have seen one film in the morning then crossed the road for a matinee showing of another. He retained his love of American gangster flicks, B-features and westerns, and became interested in the new European directors, Godard, Rossellini, Bergman and Chabrol. In the art school, there were fresh audiences for his encyclopaedic knowledge of film and filmmakers and he was recognised as an aficionado among other cinema-loving students. When the college film society began regular Sunday afternoon screenings at the Dorchester on George Street, Lewis joined and developed an interest in the emerging new wave of British writers and directors. Here, perhaps for the first time, he identified the characteristics of his own parents and their preoccupations in the films he watched and the books he read. Friends remember him being distinctly uncomfortable with depictions of this instantly recognisable world. When Richard Hoggart wrote about working class archetypes in kitchen sink dramas in The Uses of Literacy in 1957, he might have been describing Bertha and Harry Lewis: ‘“Our Mam” is a solid, asexual presence contained within and defined by the domestic sphere. “The mester” or father, by contrast, is a figure inscribed by the work he does, commanding respect from his family and the community rather than love.’
Although cross-country running, beery belligerence and a tendency to fantasise about himself make it seem as if Lewis was engaged in a private game of kitchen sink bingo, he was never quite John Osborne’s prototypical ‘angry young man’. His frustration was not political or overtly anti-social. He was too shy for that, at least when sober. But he did kick hard against the conventions of his upbringing. In later years, he would talk about how he’d detested having to attend social events in Barton. Usually these were connected with his father’s masonic responsibilities where formal conventions were adhered to and the Lewises measured themselves against wealthier middle class Barton families.
Evidence that the new wave would influence the kinds of harder-edged genre films Lewis preferred came with Hell Drivers in 1957, directed by exiled American, Cy Endfield. In terms of tone and treatment, Stanley Baker’s performance as ex-con, Tom Yately, confronted by Patrick McGoohan’s road foreman, ‘Red’, and his gang of corrupt lorry drivers, did much to redefine the way in which leading men were portrayed on screen. Now they could be provincial, working class, and hard as nails. In Hell Drivers, everyone is on the take. Action rattles at pace on rough tracks and backroads from a greasy driver’s caff to a quarry side wasteland, doubling as a battleground. The haulage industry was home territory for Lewis. He knew these lorry drivers, or men like them, from his father’s and his own experiences of the goings-on at Elsham Lime Works. In Dave Rolinson’s notes for the 50th anniversary edition of Hell Drivers, he quotes from an interview Endfield gave to Films and Filming – a magazine to which Lewis subscribed – in which the director refutes the suggestion that ‘Hell Drivers could not happen in this country’, pointing out that ‘I researched the subject for a long while. And I say it could, and does, happen here.’
An unusually tough film for the time with echoes of James Curtis’s socially-aware pre-war novel, They Drive by Night, Hell Drivers’ earthy brutality broke new ground. Critics praised its ‘rough, tough action’ and its authenticity, particularly in the fight sequences. Realistic, as Baker explains in the documentary Look In On Hell Drivers, because he and McGoohan used their own experiences as amateur boxers. Aside from the ‘bruises and loose teeth’, the dialogue, particularly between the drivers, had the ring of truth. It was offhand, confrontational and bitterly humorous. When Lucy, the firm’s secretary, asks Yately if he has been in prison, he makes no attempt to sugar-coat the fact: ‘I wasn’t framed, and nobody talked me into anything. And the judge didn’t give me a raw deal. Happy?’
It didn’t take long for Lewis to acclimatise to student life. As he made new friends, the art school’s basement common room, where students went to smoke cigarettes and socialise, became part theatre and part playground. There was a raised, spotlit area where girls sat, drank coffee and chatted. Lewis would look in and select his ‘target for tonight’, echoing the wartime RAF propaganda film. He might have his eye on a particular girl. Other times he would hold court in the common room, occupying one of a random assortment of battered, motheaten easy chairs, telling jokes and anecdotes to an attentive audience. Part James Dean, part Lost Boy, his stories were designed with the sole purpose of attracting girls. Judy Burnett remembers one Lewis line. ‘He’d had some illness when he was a kid and he told them his heart was weak and that he didn’t have long to live – only maybe a week or two. He said he was going to die and the girls fell for it.’
It worked. Frequently. There were variations on the theme of his own imminent death or his parents’ impending divorce. Dick Armstrong remembers Lewis entering the common room ashen-faced, planting himself in an armchair, saying he’d been to the doctor and had been warned if he had one more cigarette he’d die. ‘As he told this story, gradually there was a girl on one arm of the chair with an arm around him, then a girl on the other arm, and several in a kind of puddle around his feet. I saw him half an hour later and he was smoking as if nothing had happened.’ On one occasion, Armstrong received a lesson from Lewis in the art of enigmatic attraction:
‘I used to bring LPs, carrying them under my arm, we all did. He called me over once and said, “Dick, the way you carry those LPs everyone can see what you’ve got. That’s really off, you shouldn’t advertise what you’ve got.” I said, “Well you carry yours under your arm.” He said, “Yeah, but I’ve always got the cover to my body.” The penny dropped, that by slightly disguising the artist or the LP, he’d be a bit more mysterious and they’d all think, “What’s Lew got today; what’s he listening to?”’
Once Lewis had set his sights on a girl, he was usually successful. If he lost interest, the girl would be dismissed, usually finding out by discovering he was seeing someone else. Armstrong ran into trouble when he began going out with a girl called Janet Camm:
‘She appeared at college the same day I did and she was gorgeous. Anyway, Ted snapped her up. When their relationship ended, she transferred her affections to me. I was in the gents’ toilets and found myself face to face with Ted angrily demanding to know what I was doing with Janet. He said he “hadn’t finished with her yet”. He was spoiling for a fight so I backed off. You see, the unwritten rule was that he’d do the ditching.’
Armstrong kept his distance for some time after that and when he and Janet did eventually get together, he asked her why she’d ended the relationship with Lewis. ‘She said he’d been peculiar with his sexual demands, but I didn’t take it any further.’
For the first two years at art school, when Lewis came home to Barton his friends who had been granted access to the school sixth form were still around. They were together, just as they’d always been, going to the pictures and listening to jazz records in Lewis’s room at Westfield Road. In October 1957, when the Count Basie Orchestra played Scunthorpe’s Pavilion Cinema, Lewis was there. In 1958, when the Dave Brubeck Quartet played at Scunthorpe Baths on one of the US State Department sponsored tours, Riverbank Boy, Pete Bacon – known as ‘Streaky’ and no great fan of jazz – was press-ganged into taxi duty. Seeing and hearing Brubeck and his band close up brought Lewis’s admiration to a new level. Brubeck’s 1959 LP, Time Out, would become a firm favourite.
In the long summer holidays between art school years, Harry Lewis arranged for his son, along with Nick Turner, to be taken on as casual labour in the quarry at Elsham. Their job as hammermen involved looking through newly blasted chalk rocks for pieces of flint that couldn’t be ground down, then breaking the rocks to remove the flint. Lewis wasn’t much good at manual work. He swung the hammer, but with little real effect. On these long summer days in a dusty white bowl of the quarry under the blazing sun, there was plenty of scope for skiving off to chat and play cards. ‘If we came across something big enough to hit,’ remembers Turner, ‘we’d have a go.’ The few pounds they earned came from Harry’s back pocket.
Lewis was always observing, watching and listening to the working men from Lincolnshire villages. He liked to listen to one older labourer who told stories about his wife. ‘When there’s a thunderstorm, my missis goes to bed with a pair of wellies on, because she’s frightened of electricity. Bugger me if last night she didn’t go to sleep with my wellies on her arms as well.’ It might have been a caption from a Sillince cartoon.
By the time Lewis returned to art school for the third year in September 1958, the daily commute across the river, always something of a hindrance to his social life, was becoming intolerable. He had argued for some time that he needed to move out and find digs in Hull. Not surprisingly, Harry and Bertha were against it, but Lewis persisted, arguing that he would be better able to work. Eventually they relented and he found a place in lodgings at 9 Ash Grove, Hull.
Ron Burnett had started the National Diploma in Design course a year later than Lewis. An accomplished trombonist, already an established player on the Hull jazz scene, Ron played in the Unity Jazz Band alongside a group of like-minded friends. The Unity, so named because their original line-up had rehearsed in the Unity Hall on Anlaby Road, rather than any notion of collective politics, were one of a clutch of new bands inspired to play New Orleans style traditional jazz. Dismissed by some as ‘rumpy-pumpy dance music’, characterised by improvisation on traditional themes, and revered by purists who saw it as jazz music’s most authentic form, the music had a simplicity, freedom and rawness to it. The Unity had established itself as the art school band, although their followers included a sprinkling of undergraduates from the university and assorted friends and fans. Lewis became their piano player. Rock ’n’ Roll may have alienated parents and inspired moral panic headlines as the coming of Elvis, Jerry Lee and Little Richard grabbed the attention of sections of British youth but, for Lewis, playing jazz fitted the bill perfectly and the Unity were among a number of local bands to ride the crest of the trad wave. Many were accomplished players. The Bay City Jazz Band from Bridlington included Mick and Chris Pyne, on piano and trombone respectively – Mick also played cornet and tenor sax. The brothers would later be invited to join Humphrey Lyttelton’s band and Mick would tour as piano player with Stan Getz. The trad crowd followed British musicians like Chris Barber, Ken Colyer, George Melly and Kenny Ball, all of whom played in Hull at one time or another. For a few, chart success would follow as the 1950s gave way to the 60s. But for ‘Lew’ Lewis, Ron Burnett, Tony Dugdale – clarinet, Eric Dobson – banjo, Alan Peacock – trumpet, Norman Wilson – double bass, Brian Thompson – drums, and Nick Marling – van driver, roadie, sometime manager and general factotum, playing trad to rooms full of sweaty dance-crazy students for beer and a few shillings was like being in a pop group.
Lewis’s art school years saw the rise and fall of a generation of rock, pop and skiffle sensations, a few would-be stars and plenty who never quite lived up to the hype. Hull was a regular stop on the package tour circuit. Promoters made the most of the latest singing sensation by setting them up with a 15 or 20 minute closing spot on a bill largely dominated by middle of the road variety acts, comics, ventriloquists, crooners, TV personalities and the occasional local band. In the late 50s, rock ’n’ roll and skiffle groups were guaranteed to fill theatres. Among the largely forgotten Terry Denes, Gary Millers and Charlie Gracies, you could have seen the Platters, Lonnie Donegan or Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Hull Regal, later the Everly Brothers, and Gene Vincent; at the Cecil you could have screamed for Marty Wilde, Adam Faith, and Cliff Richard and the Shadows. Ron Burnett remembers the Unity played support to Marty Wilde at a university student union fundraiser. Touring dates suggest this was at the end of March 1959 as Wilde was riding high in the charts with Donna. Lewis was deeply envious of the cowboy gunbelt the rock ’n’ roller wore on stage that night.
Lewis and Ron Burnett became firm friends, sharing Hemingway, Steinbeck and Chandler and the short stories they read in The New Yorker. They were a double act whose instant rapport and sparky, instinctive patter was at the heart of the band and the social group that formed around it. Their verbal interplay, inspired by the Marx Brothers, the Goons, Spike Jones and Mad Magazine, became a kind of band in-speak among the art school jazz crowd. Lewis was also a fan of the radio show, Hancock’s Half Hour. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson’s scripts were clever, funny and melancholic, predicated on the doomed-to-fail self-awareness of Hancock’s character. For the episode first broadcast on 8 April 1958, and later included on the LP, Pieces of Hancock, the show celebrated the centenary of the fictional East Cheam Festival of Arts. The East Cheam Drama Festival – ‘direct from the stage of the scouts’ hall, Cheam’ – consisted of three short playlets performed by Hancock and his repertory company. The first playlet parodies the once popular Victorian melodrama of identity and duplicity, East Lynne, and is titled Jack’s Return Home; the second takes a knowing swipe at the kitchen sink preoccupations of contemporary theatre in Look Back in Hunger by the playwright John Eastbourne; finally the evening falls into complete chaos as Hancock celebrates The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven and the Song that Made him Famous, hurried to a conclusion because Hancock is keen to get home for the ‘boxing on the telly’.
Lines from radio shows found their way into Lewis’s and Burnett’s knockabout lingo. Or they’d make up their own. Former art student, Harry Duffin, remembers their response to a chance comment overheard in the art school gents’ toilets:
‘I was in the men’s toilets downstairs at college. There used to be a bit of a scrum to get at the mirror. I was pretty vain and had a good crop of hair and I was standing combing my locks when Ted and Ron were there and I made some off the cuff comment to a mate about my “sheer physical beauty”. I thought nothing of it until the next session of the Unity Jazz Band I was at. It was in a large school hall and a guy called Graham [Ron Burnett recalls it was Graham Palmer], who was a mate of Ted’s, went to the microphone and announced that Ted had written a new song which the band were about to perform. The band struck up a riff and Graham began to sing – “The sheer physical beauty of Harry Duffin, makes the girls go ooh-la-la.” That was the song, the riff and just those words repeated over and over. It got a good laugh and, for a while, the band played it every time I turned up at a gig.’
Ron’s mum, Gwen, and his dad, also called Ron, ran the Station Inn on Hull’s Beverley Road, a short distance from Lewis’s digs, and the Unity crowd often congregated there before going out. If it wasn’t the Station, it would be the Argyle or the Midland, a favourite hangout before college gigs. After hours, Gwen, fondly remembered as a ‘proper landlady’ by Lewis’s friends, hosted parties long into the night.
With a network of pubs, clubs, gigs and parties, it was easy to tap into Hull’s jazz scene and find like-minded music fans. Jackie Scoble, who first saw the Unity at an outdoor gig at Little Switzerland – an open space on the Humber foreshore at Hessle – remembers ‘these really dishy looking guys, playing brilliant music, out for a good time with the girls. Lew was like a film star, so was Tony (Dugdale) and the others, and jazz was the thing. The music was enough to get us on a real high. You got up and danced, and you were worn out at the end of the evening.’ Lewis’s film star credentials are on display in a photograph taken by Graham Palmer at around this time. Palmer had taken a few shots of the band, but the portrait is of Lewis alone, posed in candy-striped open neck shirt, tweed jacket, and with a carefully combed quiff. A good looking boy. Every inch the 1950s matinee idol.
Whatever its musical merits, trad jazz was an expression of youthful abandon; an energetic alternative to the mainstream influence of dance band music, watered down rock ’n’ roll and pale pop ballads. For the Unity and their audience, it meant good times, drinking, dressing up and playing simple, accessible dance music. Ron Burnett is the first to admit the Unity were learning their trade as musicians. Lewis, he remembers, was fairly accomplished. Mike Gordon played piano in the university jazz band and recalls Lewis teaching him to play the Jelly Roll Morton classic, Dr Jazz Stomp, taking him through the chords, trademark cigarette dangling from his lips. The Unity regularly filled the floor at their Friday night residency at the Blue Bell, the stomping ground of many local jazz bands. In a narrow room over the pub, packed with fans and drinkers, the band played two sets a night. Charge for admission varied between sixpence and a shilling, depending on the bands playing. Lewis was cool, one of the cool, according to followers of the band. He revelled in the possibilities of jazz, beer and girls who would sleep with him. As Jackie Scoble says, ‘every girl in the crowd was in love with somebody or thought that somebody was wonderful’. She remembers a night Lewis missed the last ferry. A friend was waiting for her father to give her a lift home. She offered Lewis a lift back to her parents’ house in Cottingham and he stayed over in the spare room. In the middle of the night, the girl crept into his bed. Not surprisingly, he didn’t say no.
The 2.19 Band was a rival outfit from the art school architecture department, playing a regular gig in a pub off Hessle Road. They would arrange to go out together, to the cinema, to dances or to jazz gigs, or to see and be seen at the Picadish. Fellow student Neville Smith, who would later write the classic thriller Gumshoe, had come to the University of Hull from Liverpool. He remembers the most important question for an evening out would be, ‘Are we going Bo or Italian?’ ‘Bo’ meant bohemian, an Anglicised beatnik look of baggy sweaters and drainpipe trousers associated with trad jazz fans. Italian was inspired by the continental and Ivy League stylings of modern jazz players. The art students tended to have a foot in both camps. For the most part, they were bohemians by necessity, affecting a careless scruffy appearance. They didn’t have the income to pull off the Italian look with any confidence, although Ron Burnett was known to tour what he referred to as the ‘dead men’s shops’ for good suits and have them altered. He remembers his first encounter with Neville Smith and Brian Case on the steps of the art school. ‘Nev asked me were there any bohemians in Hull?’
Growing up in south east London, the son of a policeman, Brian Case would acquire legendary status as a writer on jazz, film and crime fiction for Time Out and the NME, as well as being the author of several landmark books and a highly regarded novel, The Users. He and Neville Smith met at the University of Hull. They would remain good friends for many years.
In July 2015, back in Hull’s Central Library for a reading and conversation session on the launch of his interview memoir On The Snap, Case shared his memories of the city. ‘It could be a dangerous place – drunk decky-learners, dreadful Tetleys beer, you couldn’t buy decent jazz records. It wasn’t so much rock ’n’ roll, it was more Teddy Boys, awful long jackets in maroon, zigzag pockets.’ Case had seen his first Teddy Boy in Deptford and been awestruck by the style, the confidence, the sharpness. But he was very much an Italian suit man. ‘It was all very exact. London had places where you could get your stuff – Old Compton Street, I’d get stuff in there. You tried to go for American import suits. Ivy League suits. Like the jazz men. Which was natural shoulder line, not tapered, three buttons. It was all very technical. I used to go to Maison Alpha in Old Compton Street, seven shillings and sixpence for a Gerry Mulligan haircut, swept to the side like a longish bob.’ He remembers hitching to Leeds to see Art Blakey and to Manchester to see John Coltrane. In Hull, he and Neville Smith frequently found themselves at Unity gigs. Smith has perhaps the most vivid memory of Lewis the trad piano player:
‘Every Saturday night in the late 1950s, the Unity Jazz Band, under the leadership of trombonist Ronnie Burnett, played in the Common Room of Hull University Students’ Union. Their band uniform was a Victorian version of Italian suits, with pointed shoes, drainpipe trousers, high-button jackets, stiff Victorian collars with rounded ends and slim ties. At the piano, with dark rings under drooping eyelids, blond hair falling over his face, sporting a pearl tie-pin, and with a permanent fag between his lips, sat a man I came to know as Lou. (In my mind, Lou is always how I have spelt the name.) Lou, to my envious eyes, never looked anything other than utterly shagged out.’
There were bohemians in Hull, of a sort, but Lewis was not one of them. Quietly conventional and ‘quite dapper’ in his own way, according to art school friend, Keith Riseam, Lewis was ‘slight, not a big lad, lovely blond hair, cheeky, a good sense of humour. He played trad and enjoyed playing it, but he would go into rooms and sit and listen to modern jazz’.
For Colin MacInnes, whose 1959 novel, Absolute Beginners, threw the spotlight on the styles and customs of the two diametrically opposed jazz tribes, the culture was a teenage declaration of independence. The Dean is a ‘sharp modern jazz creation’ with ‘college-boy smooth crop hair’, a ‘neat white round-collared Italian shirt’ and ‘short Roman jacket very tailored’. By contrast, writes MacInnes, the Misery Kid with his ‘horrible leanings towards the trad thing’ is full-on bohemian. His hair is long and ‘brushless’; his shirt has a ‘white stiff-starched collar (rather grubby)’ and his short jacket is old, ‘somebody’s riding tweed, most likely’. In contrast with Hull’s more integrated jazz scene, MacInnes’ tribes are rarely, if ever, seen together in public.
In August 1959, Lewis and his resolutely trad bandmates piled their gear into Alan Peacock’s dad’s Humber Snipe and travelled to Leeds for a recording session. The resulting five tracks are the only surviving recordings of the Unity: My Daddy Rocks Me; Travelling Blues; Marching through Georgia; Shine; and Black and Blues showcase a mix of live favourites and New Orleans standards made famous by, among others, Louis Armstrong and Trixie Smith. All are given the Unity treatment. The band seems loose and relaxed, particularly letting go on the uptempo numbers. For the session there was no bass, which wasn’t unusual. Stand-up basses were expensive and hard to come by, hence skiffle groups making do with the tea-chest variety. Eric Dobson’s banjo and Brian Thompson’s drums were the rhythm section. The quality of the recording is basic at best, but the performance swings enthusiastically. This is music made for the joy of it. Lewis’s piano drops in and out of the mix, but where it shines through on solos he shows himself an instinctively rhythmic player, picking out licks and more than holding his own.
The art school calendar was punctuated by regular social events: freshers’ dances, riverboat shuffles, Christmas parties, and summer fancy dress balls. The riverboat shuffles began as a novelty with four or five bands playing for an evening. The organisers would hire one of the Humber ferries, sailing from Corporation Pier as far as Spurn Point at the mouth of the estuary, before turning – a manoeuvre which made for some particularly choppy, piano-sliding-across-floor moments – and making the return trip, arriving back in Hull around midnight. One night, they didn’t have a piano. Ron remembers, ‘Ted was distraught so we went to a nearby pub, just off the pier, borrowed a piano and pushed it onto the boat and pushed it back afterwards’. On a good night, there might be 600 passengers on board. Brian Case remembers, ‘You had to be pissed to enjoy them. They were very Dixieland. Like with all those things, after an hour you wanted to get off but you were trapped.’ Another night, the Unity backed jazz legend, George Melly. ‘Someone suggested we get someone to guest with the band and we asked George Melly,’ says Ron Burnett. Melly had sat in with bands before, memorably on one drunken evening in a pub on Anlaby Road, most likely the Argyle. ‘It just appealed to him, so he came up to Hull and sang with the band at this golf club in Melton.’ Martin Turner has a memory of the infamously hedonistic Melly in a radio interview some years later saying the best pianist he’d ever heard was a student called Ted Lewis from Hull.
When the Unity played, they would invariably meet in the pub for a pre-gig pint or two. For many of the gigs, including those at the college and the Windsor Hall, there was no bar; but the students always found places to stash drink and ways to get drunk. Early in 1959 there was a short-lived craze for preludin, a prescription diet pill that worked as an appetite suppressant and upper. Keith Riseam recalls, ‘You’d take a couple of those and go for twenty-four hours’. But the phase didn’t last; three-day hangovers were barely worth the high. Lewis’s friend, Mike Shucksmith, also refused entry to Barton Grammar School sixth form, had been called into the RAF for two years’ National Service. He’d visit whenever he could and remembers the preludin fad taking its toll on Lewis:
‘Not being a very robust guy physically, Ed was like a skeleton on these things. Apart from juicing him up so he could go and live the life of Riley with the band and everything else he got up to, he didn’t eat much. I remember, if he was going home for the weekend, he would call in at my house to see what I was up to, if I was home or not. And my mother used to say he looked like a man of forty. This was when he was about seventeen or eighteen.’
For the most part, Lewis and the trad scene’s drug of choice was alcohol. Ron Burnett remembers a night out to see Gerry Mulligan and his band at Hull City Hall. ‘We met at a pub before the gig for a few drinks, then stopped on the way at another pub, then another. We were late by then so we ran to the next pub, the Punch Hotel, opposite the City Hall. Lew threw up and said straight away, “Right, let’s go and have another drink.”’
The new wave films, piano playing and jazz clubs, combined with a louche style and good looks, added to Lewis’s carefully cultivated mystique. Judy Burnett remembers him as ‘physically small, slight. The girls would think he was so sweet. He wasn’t a strong man, sweet face, cigarette hanging on his lip, bottle of beer on the piano.’ It’s an image captured in a handful of grainy black and white photos from the time.
The combination of drink and an almost compulsive need to chat up women brought Lewis into conflict with even his closest friends. One night he made a play for Ron Burnett’s mother at the Station Inn. Lewis had also known his friend was keen on a girl named Catherine, but it didn’t prevent him chatting her up and taking her back to his digs. A few days later, Lewis apologised. ‘He said he was drunk and didn’t know what he was doing.’
Jan Chesterman was a regular on the Hull jazz scene. She recalls being at a party where Lewis had a fling with the girlfriend of a member of the 2.19 Band:
‘Lew took her off this guy, so he filled a vodka bottle with 2001 carpet cleaner, put it on the table and said, “That’s mine, no-one touch it” knowing Lew would pinch it. I remember being told Lew had drunk the vodka. I was really concerned, so I took him back to my house and made him drink loads of milk. I don’t know how much of it he’d had, but it was a close call.’
When friends from Barton came across for weekends, Lewis set them up with blind dates. John Dickinson remembers ‘He was having a great time, we were quite envious; art school made our lives seem a bit humdrum.’ At one art school Christmas party, Lewis set Dickinson up with a girl who smoked a pipe. ‘It was Chinese themed night and I remember going into the gents and there were all these Chinamen strewn around the floor.’ Lewis’s girl-chasing exploits – Alan Dickinson describes them as ‘an extension of his athletics career’ – almost came to a dramatic end when he was discovered in bed with one young girl. Nick Turner remembers. ‘Her father threw Ed out the house, chased him down the street and said he’d nail his balls to the college door if he ever saw him again.’
In September 1959, Lewis began his final year at art school with the preparatory work for the portfolio he would present to Bill Sillince. As usual, he had applied himself at the last minute, finishing as term started. Sillince was impressed with the drawings, most of which had been inspired by Lewis’s home and garden at Westfield Road, the orchard and the north Lincolnshire landscape around Barton and the Humber foreshore. With the college year barely into gear and his work accepted, the pressure was relieved and his social life could once more take priority. He cast his customary eye over the new student intake. There was Heather Morton, his current girlfriend; she was pretty, affectionate and loyal. Judy Burnett remembers, ‘She dearly loved him, but he was rather cruel to her.’ A wonderfully disorganised group photo of the art school crowd taken on the beach at Fraisthorpe earlier that summer evokes those days of beer, sunshine, picnics, pretty girls in summer dresses and skinny lads with windblown hair and good sunglasses. Lewis is in swimming trunks, a bottle of beer and a cigarette on the go, Heather at his side. Shortly after the new term began, Lewis ended their relationship. He would later rename her ‘Hilary’ in his novel All the Way Home and All the Night Through, writing that, after the break-up, she’d confronted him at the freshers’ dance where the band was playing, that he’d ignored her, and she’d become drunk and hysterical, wailing and sobbing uncontrollably. Heather doesn’t remember the scene being quite as dramatic, only that she’d been upset at being let down.
At seventeen, Juliet Raahauge had gone to great lengths to persuade her parents to allow her to attend art school. Her mother and father, with a house in the affluent village of Kirk Ella and a family connection to the ‘county set’, had thought it a bad idea. Juliet had never had a steady boyfriend, at least not one who’d taken her beyond adolescent hand holding. The art school, with its reputation for parties, jazz, booze and bohemian behaviour was not considered appropriate. If Juliet was to attend, her mother would decide the terms.
To begin with she kept her distance from Lewis. He was, she says, ‘a big name’ in college, someone whose reputation as an art school lothario preceded him. With her mother’s strict rules, she had less freedom than most of her contemporaries. For Lewis, this made finding ways to chat up Juliet far more of a challenge than he was used to, but he’d made his mind up she was the one. His pursuit signalled a departure from his usual technique of feigning uninterest and expecting the girl to do the chasing. But Juliet didn’t fall at his feet. She was, remembers Judy Burnett, ‘an English rose who arrived at college in twinset and pearls’, from a world that Lewis had rarely encountered. He had fallen in love with someone very different from himself. The layers of mystique fell away as he let slip the film star nonchalance he’d created over the preceding three years.
In a memorable scene in All the Way Home and All the Night Through, Lewis’s literary stand-in, Victor Graves, discusses his feelings of class insecurity with ‘Philip’, home from medical school. Lewis identified himself as being working class, aspirational perhaps, but not quite middle class. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. Lewis was anxious, inhibited, and knew he needed to overcome his anxieties or risk losing Juliet altogether. And, if that wasn’t complicated enough, there was Juliet’s mother’s approval to gain. Mrs Raahauge needed to be convinced, particularly since a family friend had passed on gossip about the jazz-playing blond boy with a succession of girls in tow. But when Juliet invited Lewis home, he arrived, immaculately dressed in his Prince of Wales check suit, and turned on the charm. ‘She adored him,’ Juliet remembers. On a shopping trip to Hull, she and her mother met Lewis in the street. ‘Ted had these long eyelashes and my mum asked, could she take a cutting from them? I was so embarrassed.’
On several occasions, Juliet made the trip across the river to stay at Westfield Road. Bertha and Harry welcomed her warmly, as did his grandmother. ‘You could tell he had a great affection for her. She and William the cat were such an important part of his life.’ Juliet remembers Mrs Shaw as a large lady who spent her time sitting in the corner of the room ‘radiating calm and love’. Bertha doted on him. ‘His mother got all dressed up and had her hair done when he came round. She always made him his favourite sausage sandwich and would hover about like a tiny bird making sure that he was happy.’ Harry she remembers as ‘laconic, gangly, but quite a wit’.
From the beginning, Lewis and Juliet’s relationship was intense. They began to wear beatnik black, visiting the cinema to be alone with each other rather than attending classes. Juliet’s mother’s rules were tested to the limit, then broken. The courtship was not without flashpoints, more often than not driven by Lewis’s drink-fuelled insecurity. Drinking excessively made him difficult and, as Juliet remembers, he began to have blackouts. ‘He’d end up paralytic and in a corner being sick or not knowing who he was. It was exhausting. He was a demon, like a Jekyll and Hyde character, accusative, rude, violent, and aggressive for no reason.’
Intoxication made Lewis jealous of any relationship Juliet had with other male friends, even if they were his friends too. At a Wild West themed art school dance, Lewis had dressed as Doc Holliday, complete with model six-shooters, bootlace tie and cowboy hat. The band met at the pub as usual and began drinking. Lewis had convinced himself Juliet wouldn’t be coming, that she would leave him. By the time she arrived – Hiawatha in a short fringed buckskin dress – he was drunk and thoroughly obnoxious. When the band were due to play, Lewis was incapable and they went on without him. He wandered through the college looking for Juliet. She and Keith Riseam had escaped for a coffee at the Wimpy Bar. Keith remembers, ‘It was about ten o’clock by the time we got back. Ted was beside himself and I thought I was dead. He thought I’d pinched Juliet.’
At some point in the evening, Lewis had punched through a window and his hand was bleeding quite badly. He’d also fallen down the art school stairs, dragging some Gaudi drawings on loan from a London gallery off the wall as he lost his footing. With the help of friends, Juliet managed to get him to Hull Infirmary to have the wound dressed. She had arranged to stay with Judy, but ended up spending the night with Lewis on a friend’s sofa. Early the following morning the phone rang at Judy’s. It was Mrs Raahauge. She wanted to speak to Juliet. Judy said she was still in bed, but Mrs Raahauge insisted she be allowed to speak to her daughter. A terrified Judy had to come clean. She passed on the phone number of the house where Lewis and Juliet had stayed. Mrs Raahauge arrived by car and took Juliet home. After a considerable period of contrition and some careful persuasion, Juliet convinced her mother to allow her to continue to see Lewis. The relationship carried on into 1960 and what would be Lewis’s final year in Hull.
Increasingly, the prospect of leaving college, his friends, the band and the city weighed heavily. Lewis, Ron Burnett and others began to make their way to London for weekends, hitching a lift south, going to the theatre, seeing films, and visiting jazz clubs. They regularly took in sessions at Ronnie Scott’s and the Cy Laurie jazz club in Soho’s Ham Yard – Laurie and his band had played in Hull and the club he ran would go on to become the legendary mod club, The Scene, in the early 60s. Ronnie Scott’s was renowned as a real jazz club; there it was all about the music. ‘There were no hassles to buy beers or drink up,’ says Ron. The jazz on offer included the best touring bands from the US. Consequently, the Hull crowd were on the spot for some of the greatest performances of the era, catching, among others, Zoot Sims, Stan Getz, and Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.
As well as giving the art students the opportunity to take in shows and exhibitions, trips to London gave Lewis a taste of the adventure he craved. Soho, with its sex shops, Maltese gangsters and prostitutes was, as George Melly said, ‘perhaps the only area in London where the rules didn’t apply’. Less of the bohemian no-go area and artistic enclave it had once been, it was still a place you could be bad and pretty much get away with it. Lewis and his friends drank in pubs like the Blue Posts and ate cheaply at The Star, an Italian Restaurant where they’d buy a plate of spaghetti Bolognese for three shillings and sixpence. A stone’s throw away in Meard Street, The Gargoyle, Soho’s infamous pre- and post-war hangout for artists, poets, bohemians and pornographers had been bought by a couple of Soho businessmen with an eye for the main chance. Jimmy Jacobs and Michael Klinger soon reopened the place as a strip club, the Nell Gwynne Revue. Lewis was enthralled by the opportunities on offer in London. He and Ron saw Beyond the Fringe at the Fortune Theatre and One Over the Eight with Kenneth Williams at the Duke of York’s. Ron remembers a night out at the newly opened Establishment Club: ‘You felt you could do all these things, go anywhere, and do anything.’
As the end of term approached, Lewis submitted his final portfolio. In the summer student rag parade, the art school crowd were on floats along with students from the university. Lewis was wearing nothing more than a pair of swimming trunks. When the float reached Queen’s Gardens, Juliet needed the toilet. She went into Hammonds department store and then got back on the float, not realising Lewis had followed her into the store. By the time he emerged, the floats had gone and Lewis had to walk the mile and a half back to the university in his swimming trunks. When he arrived, he was fuming.
Art school ended. Lewis played a final few gigs with the band. Juliet left on a family holiday for a fortnight. When she returned, after two weeks in which Lewis’s insecure imagination had taken hold, he felt something had changed and no amount of reassurance could convince him she hadn’t been unfaithful (he had slept with another woman at his farewell party). A few weeks later, at a friend’s party, he drank even more than usual and accused Juliet of imagined infidelities. In a drunken rage that night, Lewis hit Juliet, ending the relationship once and for all. Later, he would reflect on the events of that night in Victor’s guilt-ridden internal monologue at the key moment in All the Way Home and All the Night Through, writing, ‘This is going to be dreadful and you are too drunk to realise how vicious and painful it’s going to be… you want to hurt her because she is true and in hurting her you will hurt yourself in payment for your cheating.’
Juliet still struggles to understand what fuelled Lewis’s insecurity. ‘He’d had a good childhood, his mum and dad loved him and he was well treated. But he told me all sorts of things, that his parents were getting divorced, that his heart was bad and he had months to live. He just said things to get sympathy and he didn’t need to do that.’ With the relationship over, it seemed her friends were only too willing to admit that Lewis had been going with other women. ‘I realised he’d been much more of a bad boy than I ever thought. Other people would be only too pleased to tell you, but I was mortified.’
Juliet had been Lewis’s first real love. He was miserable, telling Alan Dickinson the relationship ending was ‘the end of the world’.
Lewis left art school with his National Diploma in Design. Friends had assumed he would go to London to work in illustration. He applied for jobs without success and moved back home for the summer, supported by his parents. His dream of living and working in London in the film industry seemed more distant than ever. He was drinking a great deal and attempting to reconcile himself to the self-inflicted failure of the relationship with Juliet. He began to write, initially drawing on his earliest memories and the experiences of his father’s wartime absences. He would later tell William Foster of The Scotsman, ‘First off, I was all set to write my whole life story. All about my childhood during the war when my father was away and Manchester where I’d been born.’ In the event he was drawn to the raw, confessional passages which dealt with Juliet and the final year at art school. With hindsight, it seems a literary penance. Lewis was in Barton, his friends mostly working or studying elsewhere, and the relationship which mattered beyond all others had been sacrificed to drink and insecurity. What was he to do but unsparingly write it all?
His design and illustration portfolio had been sent to several employment agencies. Finally, in what feels like something of a last-ditch solution, when a job offer did come through with Westland Aircraft in Somerset, he took it. It wasn’t what he wanted or where he wanted, but if he wasn’t to remain adrift indefinitely, he had no choice other than to pack his bags and head west.