So I returned to Bethnal Green, back to my old stomping grounds of Victoria Park, the Mile End Road and Hackney. My new job was probably the least creative and demanding pursuit that any man could undertake. It was simply cutting out the little oval rubber inserts that make up the Mason Pearson hairbrush. The factory itself resided by the side of a canal; to say it was Dickensian would be an understatement. In fact, it would be an insult to Dickens.
It retained all the worst and grimiest aspects of the Industrial Revolution. Dirty, dangerous and reeking of decay. To reach my operating position, I had to climb a rickety ladder and walk across what was fondly referred to as a walkway, but was little more than a gangplank. This spanned two huge vats of some seething, bubbling liquid. I always imagined this to be acid, but it probably wasn’t.
If the factory inspectors of today had been around then, they would have shut the whole place down. Health and safety were positively disregarded. The corner in which I worked consisted of a large press bolted to an already decrepit floor. A few steel pattern cutters lay on a shelf close by, and rolls upon rolls of thin red rubber lay strewn about. The daily chore was to use the cutters like a cook would do, cutting shapes out of a sheet of flat pastry. One by one, the thunder of the machine cleaved the pattern from the rubber sheet until the sheet became a skeleton of itself.
In the course of a day, I would cut hundreds and thousands of these rubber fillers to feed the world’s hunger for hairbrushes. The people who worked there were the salt of the earth, including, I might say, the management. The bookkeeper and wage-packet filler was originally of Jamaican descent, but first generation in England. By stint of effort, he had become the accountant to this hairbrush factory. Some of my fondest memories were spent over lunch in Victoria Park, slicing the crust off the top of a hot meat pie, filling it with HP sauce, and then getting into a heated discussion with this lovely man. He would discuss politics, life, and what being black meant in England in the late fifties and early sixties. He became a very good friend.
Sometimes we used to go to a typical fifties café near the park. Six or seven wooden tables scattered around a wooden floor. The window steamed up, made foggy by the sweat and heat of forty men all arguing about last night’s football. A wave of the hand to the waitress, followed by a short, sharp cough, brought you a round of tea and toast in that little café by the park in Bethnal Green.
Day after day I reported for duty, clocked in, climbed the ladder, picked up the rubber bundles and started work. The pay was good; in fact, in relation to my other job it was fantastic. I was now making some £15 a week, but it was mind-numbing. I would look at the produce of my labour and wonder how many heads there must be in the world to be brushed with these tools of my creation.
There was a positive side to the job, though; because the execution of my job was so simple, I had time to think, to plan and imagine. The result of these thoughts was that I decided I wanted to be a painter and sculptor. I wanted to create, to live in a garret and suffer for my art. Remember, I was eighteen years old and every bit a romantic.
I applied to St Martin’s School of Art and was accepted in the September of that year. It had the reputation of being one of the best fine art schools in England. Indeed, during my three years at St Martin’s, I was taught at various times by the sculptors Sir Anthony Caro and Dame Elisabeth Frink, and the pop artist Peter Blake.
I found myself in an entirely new and riveting world. A world of Bohemianism and mental freedom. The pursuit of these freedoms tore away the last vestiges of inhibition. These were truly some of the most wonderful years of my life. Each day was a new canvas. We built a mythology about our own greatness as painters and radicals. Anti-establishment, with long hair and Levi jeans, an unheard-of commodity in 1961 – we bought them from the GIs at the American bases.
My years at St Martin’s, and later the Central School of Art, were filled with art appreciation, drawing, the enjoyment of colour and a growing awareness of the great beauty, both natural and man-made, that had been stored over centuries. ‘I will teach you to see, to record visually the images around you,’ was the daily mantra. As the history of art was revealed to my lustful eyes, my imagination grew to see the majesties of Velázquez and Vermeer, the draughtsmanship of Picasso, the sheer scale of Michelangelo. To see marble breathe, to feel the pain of Van Gogh, and more and yet more.
I observed every generation moving forward, probing with a brush or pallet; composition, perspective and colour, from the pure human to the tortuous images of Picasso, and even the matchstick men of Lowry. The art of the silversmith Benvenuto Cellini, the potters and architects: all that wealth of creation that has been passed down to us through the centuries. These were our daily rations at art school and we gorged on them.
It was during my time at St Martin’s that my entrepreneurial spirit was really born. I became the social secretary of the college and it didn’t take me long to realise that not only were previous art school dances unpopular, they also lost money. With great gusto, I set about to remedy this situation. This is where the American showman Mike Todd came in: he had demonstrated that good music and good promotion could produce a more than successful end product, which would encourage the paying public to come back the next time. And they did, in droves, until the monthly dances at St Martin’s became nationally renowned.
There was a sense of being the first liberated generation unshackled from the deprivations that the young had endured after the First and Second World Wars. A new generation that was to establish a new youth culture, one that manifested itself in the expression of the Swinging Sixties. It turned the existing demarcation lines of class upside down. Within a few years the aristocracy, who previously would never have deemed to associate with the working classes, suddenly couldn’t wait to be part of the action.
I have been asked on many occasions what it was like to have been a part of the Swinging Sixties; the suggestion always being what fun it must have been to break new ground and to turn the world upside down. The reality is that I was unaware of what had befallen previous generations. For me, this was simply the way of life, one that I thoroughly enjoyed. I was never conscious of the impact that these years would have on generations to come. There was not an abundance of sociologists hanging about suggesting that what was happening at that time was unique. They only arrived on the scene years later and dissected it all in retrospect.
In 1962, the Cold War was at its height, and my wonderful Bohemian lifestyle was suddenly under threat. It was an incident of mind-boggling world proportions, which almost led to the destruction of half the planet, and it became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Here were two of the mightiest nations in the world, the Soviet Union and the United States, about to wage nuclear destruction over the Caribbean island of Cuba.
One fateful morning in October 1962, I woke up wondering if I would ever see my twenty-first birthday. From that day to this, I have never felt the same sense of finality as I did on that morning. Every news station in the country was broadcasting the same terrifying message: nuclear war was imminent. I rushed to St Martin’s and asked the secretary if I could use the telephones in the office, then proceeded to get in contact with all the representatives of the various student unions from all over London. Polytechnics, art schools, universities – they all rose as one. All of them had the same sense of foreboding.
We marched that day, ten thousand strong, on the United States Embassy in Grosvenor Square, chanting all the way the slogans of peace. We were met by a huge police presence. Barricades dominated the square. The anger in the crowd was at boiling point. This was no ordinary protest march; it was a demonstration of survival. A few of us broke free from the pack and charged towards the embassy steps. Why, I don’t know, but I was the only one to make it to the huge glass doors that dominated the front of the building.
For some reason it hadn’t occurred to me that they would be locked, and I was suddenly isolated, left like a squirming fish on the bank of a river. I was unable to go forward, and in the ten seconds of my isolation outside those doors, I wondered what to do next. As it turned out, I didn’t have much choice in the matter, as four large coppers were charging up the embassy steps towards me. I was hoisted bodily by them and tossed back into the seething mass that had now made it to the bottom of the steps.
Afterwards, this episode taught me that if you believe passionately enough about something, it is worth fighting for. A day later, the Soviets conceded defeat and stood down, and the greatest threat to world peace had been averted.
Soon after this incident, a tiny moment happened that was to change my life. It happened during a life class, when artists draw or paint from a live, nude figure. We had stopped for a break. Most of the other students had wandered into corners drinking coffee, or they were staring out of the windows lost in their thoughts.
I wandered around the various easels, looking with more than my usual interest at the morning’s offerings, then back to my own. By my standards, this particular drawing was very good, but it wasn’t the best. It didn’t even rate second or third. And then it hit me. I was quite good as a painter and sculptor, but I just wasn’t good enough.
I knew with total clarity that in this year alone, from all the art schools in England, there were probably fifteen or more students with more talent than me. And out of these fifteen or so students, one of them, if they were lucky, might be making a decent living from their art by the time they were forty. The years at college, and in particular the commercial running of the dances, had taught me that what I needed was to combine my creative talent with some other art form or music.
I had no intention of living in a garret when I was fifty years old, or worse, being second best as a painter. I picked up my corduroy jacket, went down to the principal’s office and told him I was leaving straight away. In my wisdom, I decided that I would have to put any talents I had as a painter into a more practical artistic direction, and so came up with the idea of taking a course in interior and furnishing design.
England had still not freed itself in 1962 from the post-war yoke of functional, utility furnishing. You had to go back to Hepplewhite or Robert Adam in the eighteenth century to find a piece of well-designed British furniture. The influence of modern design movements such as Bauhaus, not to mention the astonishing developments taking place in contemporary Italian and Scandinavian furniture design, had yet to reach these shores. I saw that there was a gap in the market and thought that I could fill it by enrolling on an interior design course at the Central School of Art.
All the time that my career as an artist was stopping and starting, my entrepreneurial instincts had been bubbling away beneath the surface. During my first summer holidays at St Martin’s, I got a job for three months with a small travel company called Riviera Holidays, of which my old man was a director. His partner was an ex-cab driver named Aubrey Morris. They had started the company together following the holidays our two families used to take together in the South of France and Northern Italy. We would set off in an old Ford Anglia and his black taxi-cab, with our GB plates attached. It was a requirement then that your car displayed GB plates.
In the early fifties, it was an exciting event to come across another GBer, as we called them. If we were fortunate enough to see another British car, we would wave and flash them until they stopped, then we’d spend maybe ten minutes asking what the road ahead was like, did they know of any small villages where we could visit, or any cheap restaurants and nice hotels.
Our nightly stays in these towns and villages were hugely amusing, as crowds sometimes as large as two hundred strong would pore over the London taxi for hours. I would sit in a little café watching the multitude exploring an iconic image that they had seen only on grainy black-and-white film, or the odd poster. This was happening not a century ago, but within the past thirty-five years. We were among a few intrepid travellers from the UK, the first of a gigantic wave of people that were about to crash onto Europe.
Beaches in Italy lay empty, with hardly a parasol in sight, and no one on them for mile after mile. Today they are filled a hundred deep, stretching from Sardinia to Sicily. So, in the mid-fifties, these two adventurers started Riviera Holidays, which was later to become none other than Thomson Holidays. For the next two summers, I became one of their couriers. It sounds pretty romantic, and so it was, although the TV shows of recent years have rather tarnished this image.
I would board a train at Cattolica in Italy at about 11.30 on a Saturday morning, with the passengers arriving at about 12.00. As the train departed the station, I would witness the same twenty to thirty Italian Lotharios shedding bucketfuls of tears and shouting heartfelt farewells to the English roses, while the girls were practically throwing themselves off the train in lemming-like displays of unbridled passion. These scenes were repeated week after week. The only part of the jigsaw to stay the same was the boys. Two days after losing the loves of their lives, they would be at the station awaiting our next arrival and eyeing up the newcomers.
Anyway, as our train pulled out of Cattolica, I would be giving it large in my neatly pressed, light blue blazer, with a dashing smile and a feigned interest in the remnants of my fellow passengers’ holidays. My job for the next twenty-four hours was to accompany my charges back to Dover or Boulogne. You may think this was not too difficult. However, on one of my return trips from Boulogne to Italy, I did manage to lose two husbands, who between them had seven children and two hysterical wives. I had warned them not to get off the train, as most of the stops were unscheduled, but they saw a vendor selling delicious lasagne, alighted from the train with a few lire, and chased him down.
Seconds later, the train pulled out and they were left on the platform high and dry, with no passports, no money and no sense. It was discovered later that they didn’t even know where they were going. On the other hand, I was left with two screaming wives and seven kids. By the time the news reached me, the train was kicking off at eighty miles per hour towards Italy. It took three days to reunite the two families. The husbands were exhausted, but they were only about to start their misery, as the wives took them off to their rooms.
On reaching Boulogne on Sunday morning, I would discharge my wards before picking up another thirty or forty passengers for the return journey to Italy, arriving back in Cattolica at approximately 12.30 on Monday morning. For three months, I spent virtually three days and two nights each week on a train, for a grand total of £7 per week, plus board and lodging.
It was brought to my notice that the price of cigarettes in Italy was about five shillings a pack for UK or US produced fags. Most, if not all, of the cigarettes were smuggled in from Yugoslavia. I had also noticed that all of my passengers arrived clutching their cartons of two hundred cigarettes that they had purchased duty free on the boat. As regular as clockwork, within a week of their arrival in Cattolica, they would run out of fags and then complain about the ridiculous prices being asked locally. Their complaints were understandable, as they were being charged two or three times what they had paid on the boat.
I had an idea, but first I needed to talk to my rather more experienced fellow couriers, there being about ten of them who worked regularly on my train.
‘No, Bryan,’ I was told firmly, ‘don’t even think about it. At least three couriers have been caught smuggling on various routes in the last three months and are currently enjoying jail sentences.’
There had to be a way. I figured out that in the dead of night on the Swiss–Italian border, I could purchase as many cigarettes as I wanted at one-shilling and sixpence per pack.
There had to be a way of completing the perfect crime, not that I thought smuggling a few fags was really a crime, but how to do it? That was the puzzle. A week later, I had the answer on the way back from Boulogne having picked up my next party. In the course of my duty, I would visit the various compartments where the passengers were to spend the next twenty-four hours swaying to the motion of a fast-moving train. I’d explain about the heat of the sun, the local cheap wine, how many lire to the pound and don’t, under any circumstances, leave the train.
The business part of the day over, I would then go on to explain the plight of the various couriers and reps that worked down there. In particular, the fact that fags were very expensive. ‘Would you mind,’ I asked, ‘if I were to buy some cigarettes at the Swiss border and just stick a packet at the end of your bunks?’ I assured them that the customs would have absolutely no problems with someone taking four hundred cigarettes with them to Italy, as there was no hard and fast rule as to what tourists were permitted. As a man, they would look at their stash of two hundred and magnanimously agree.
This was repeated weekly for months. At about 1.30 in the morning, we would arrive at the border, I would make a beeline for the cigarette vendor, and buy up to five thousand cigs for my fifty tourists who were asleep on the train. With great difficulty, I would heave my bulging, large brown paper bags full of contraband onto the train and into my compartment. I then had about thirty minutes before the arrival of Italian custom officers, who would get onto the train for their inspection. In that time, I would take approximately six packets of two hundred, place one on or near a bunk, or in the overhead rack in each compartment. Several compartments later, my night’s work was done.
By eight the next morning, I had gathered my contraband back together, loaded it into a suitcase and was now ready to perform the sting. Right on schedule, within five or six days of arriving, my tourists would run out of cigarettes, only to discover the exorbitant prices being asked on the coast. At this time, I would place two or three cartons of two hundred on my lunch or dinner table. Within minutes, one of my travellers would approach and the same conversation would always take place.
‘Bryan, you don’t have any spare fags, do you? They’re bloody expensive on the beach.’
‘How much are they?’ I would enquire.
‘Oh, five or six shillings.’
‘Blimey!’ I would reply. ‘Yes, I do have some spare that I could sell you. Let’s say three shillings for twenty, a saving of almost fifty per cent.’
‘You’re a star, Bryan.’ With that a few packs left my table. The word soon spread to his acquaintances. Before you knew it, over the next two days I’d sell the lot. My profit being between £10 to £20 per week depending on the size of my party. On top of this I would also make 500 lire per head by taking clients to the various clubs. All in all, with my salary and the deals I was making, it added up to a tidy thirty-odd pounds per week. Sadly, this was for only a few months of the year.
One evening, I received a call from our head rep, a beautiful Italian girl by the name of Bruna. She asked me to come to her room. Once there, she told me she was dying of flu and that I had to take a coach party to Florence and show them the sights.
‘But Bruna, I’ve never been to Florence,’ I explained. ‘I know very little about the city!’
‘Well, you’re studying fine art, aren’t you?’ was the reply. ‘Take this guidebook, study it tonight. The coach driver knows the four or five important sights, just keep your eyes open.’
The first stop was the Ponte Vecchio bridge. The guidebook told me the dates it was erected and all the various edifices built on it. The passengers nodded in confirmation and the first trial was over. The next was the beautiful Basilica of Santa Croce, the largest Franciscan church in the world. Our driver stopped outside and pointed at it. This was obviously my next assignment, so I strode forth into the interior, followed by my hapless tour group.
I had read about one particular picture of the Madonna that I should point out, and also all the dates of the building and its age. We had been in there barely five minutes, when a question was fired from somewhere in the multitude. It was a question that froze me to the spot.
‘Bryan, where is Michelangelo buried?’
I didn’t have the foggiest idea.
This was it. The game was up. I was going to look totally stupid and shown to be the charlatan that I was. Any tour guide that couldn’t answer this question standing in the middle of Florence deserved to be shot. I hung my head in shame, not knowing how I was going to get out of this one. I swear what I am going to recount now is the honest truth. There at my feet, carved into the stone floor were the words: Qui quiace la tomba di Michelangelo. Here lies the tomb of Michelangelo.
I was standing on it!
I had been saved. I studied the words for a few more seconds before throwing my head back, turning towards my charges, and had the affront to say, ‘I’m glad you asked that question, because below where you are standing is his grave!’
‘Wow, fantastic.’ Smiles all round. They were confident that they were safe in the hands of an art historian and guide.
The rest of the day sailed by, and as they were disembarking the coach that evening, I received dozens of thank-yous for a thoroughly great day. I had scraped through once again.
• • •
Bryan’s father, Joe Morrison, had grown up near his friend Aubrey Morris in Bethnal Green, in the East End of London, and they had been at school together. The son of a Jewish baker, Morris had fought against Sir Oswald Mosley’s fascist Blackshirt marchers in the notorious Battle of Cable Street in 1936, and later he was evacuated from Dunkirk. The two men set up Riviera Holidays in the mid-fifties, after spotting a gap in the travel market for cheap package holidays in Europe for working-class families.
Later they became the first company to organise air travel for British football fans wanting to watch their teams playing against the big European clubs. Riviera Holidays became so profitable, it was bought out by the Canadian businessman Roy Thomson in 1965, when he merged it with three other travel companies to create Thomson Holidays.