THE Real Lives, Loves and Friendship of 1940s Soho and it's Workng Girls.
ALTHOUGH the manuscript of this remarkably insightful and entertaining memoir was completed back in 1977, some 30 years after the events it describes, the author abandoned plans of publication after a relative objected, presumably on grounds it would shame their family. Barbara Tate, the daughter of an Uxbridge lorry driver, obtained a scholarship to Ealing Art School in her late teens.
She later achieved success as a painter, was a member of the Royal Society of Artists and was lifetime honorary president of the Society of Women Artists. For a couple of years when she was in her early 20s she worked as a Soho prostitute’s maid, a period she refers to as her “maidship”.
A few years ago she dug out her old manuscript and submitted it for publication. Sadly she died last year having lived long enough to see her book sold to a publisher, though not long enough to witness its actual publication and the plaudits it will undoubtedly receive.
Not only is this memoir told with candour and compassion but it also affords a fascinating glimpse into a lurid byway of London’s social history. Before Soho became choked with sex shops, porn cinemas and strip joints in the Seventies, it was known as the pre-eminent red-light district in the capital.
The Forties was the era of working girls who operated from upstairs flats with windows that glowed pink and the rubric “French lessons” above the doorbell. They would patrol the streets in search of custom. It was also the era of Maltese ponces and gangsters. The principal character in Barbara Tate’s tale is a buxom blonde named Mae, a whore with a heart of gold who is the dupe of the various ponces she falls for.
She treats Babs, as she calls her new maid, like a younger sister and together they share in numerous adventures, many of them comical. The various tasks Babs was expected to perform were cleaning and tidying the shabby premises, making tea for Mae and any friends who might drop round, greeting the punters and showing them into the kitchen anteroom, locking the door against drunks, hiding the takings and buying the supplies, in particular the condoms that were sold to the trade for £1 per gross box.
Gradually, as Mae recruited more and more “kinks” who demanded to be tied up, it fell to Babs to ensure that the knots remained fastened. Mae was one of Soho’s hardest working prostitutes. When Babs asked her why she took on so many customers she replied: “Oh, I dunno love. The poor sods are there and they want it. What can you do?”
This was on a day when she had chalked up 72 and earned £85 and 10 shillings, which was “what an ordinary girl in a fairly well-paid job would earn in months”. Later, desperate to please her ponce Tony, Mae took to Benzedrine. As a result she had about 150 men in a 36-hour period and could only be persuaded to go home by the suggestion her ponce would be especially pleased to see her.
Mae had various breaks from prostitution, even marriage to a grocer, but always came back to it out of boredom with a conventional life. Tate caught up with her again when she was aged 59 and working in 1977, a month before she burned to death in her Rupert Street flat. Her body was found close to the door, which had been locked and it transpired that the fire had been no accident.
Her murderer, almost certainly her ponce, was never caught. Tate’s memoir fizzes with anecdotes and the quality of her writing is superb. Without romanticising their lives in any way she allows the humanity and dignity of Mae and her fellow West End girls to shine through.
