None of them,however,can offer the giddily turbulent sense of history that comes with The French House,the survivor of a period when soon-to-be-famous artists and writers staggered from pub to club in Soho’s cramped streets,and remade the future all the way to today.
For most of its existence,appropriately for its clientele’s refusal to play by accepted rules,it wasn’t even called The French House,at least not formally.
Its regulars took to calling it “the French” in World War II,when it was a hangout for Charles de Gaulle’s Free French Forces while Hitler’s Nazis occupied Paris. De Gaulle himself is supposed to have written his most famous speech there,rallying his people to resist.
Thereafter,it became the haunt of writers,artists,musicians,alcoholic journalists and photographers who made the Soho of the 1950s,’60s and ’70s a seething,seedy fulcrum of the creative world.
Mick Jagger,discussing a few days ago his band’s first new body of music in 20 years,recalled that the first press conference he and Keith Richards had held was “in a pub in Denmark Street (Soho) and there were two journalists ... We bought them a pint of beer and said ‘here’s our album’.”
It was 1964,the album wasThe Rolling Stones,and a revolution in the arts that resonates still was under way.
The French House,however,a block or two from the old rehearsing and recording ground of The Stones (and The Who,The Kinks,The Yardbirds,Jimi Hendrix and many more) has been around for more than a century-and-a-quarter.
The pursuits of the artists who came through its doors ranged far beyond rock music.
Welsh poet Dylan Thomas lost a first,handwritten draft of his masterpiece, Under Milk Wood,after leaving it under a chair at The French House.
Or perhaps it was another pub nearby,for Thomas could never be sure,having set out on one of his epic drinking episodes that day.
The Irish rebel,poet and playwright,Brendan Behan,wrote in the early 1950s most of his first play,The Quare Fellow,in the bar of the French.
The painters,Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon,their separate chaotic love lives and feuds happily scandalising Britain for decades,and their works later commanding prices in the tens of millions of dollars,were regulars.
So was the disorderly,charming,witty and regularly drunk journalist,Jeffrey Bernard,who wrote for many years a column inThe Spectator called “Low Life”,chronicling the eccentric lives of the habitues of Soho’s pubs and clubs as a counter to the “High Life” column of the wealthy socialite,Taki Theodoracopulos.
Bernard,who once reflected that “journalism is the only thinkable alternative to working”,was famed for failing to file columns while in the grip of a hangover or a bender.
The Spectator’s editors simply inserted the explanatory words “Jeffrey Bernard is unwell” on such occasions.
The line gained almost as much fame as his actual columns. Indeed,another of London’s great journalists and bon vivants,Keith Waterhouse,wrote a highly successful play calledJeffrey Bernard is Unwell,first performed in 1989.
Waterhouse knew much about lunching at places like The French House (his sole hobby listed inWho’s Who was “lunch”),and wrote the immensely amusingThe Theory and Practice of Lunch.
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The real wonder of it is The French House is still there.
For those seeking escape from the wearisome doings of the ignorant and the divisive,you could do worse than pay a visit,if only in the imagination.
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