eastlondonhistory.com

The kitchen sink drama is a staple of late 1950s and early 1960s cinema, with gritty northern dramas such as ‘A Taste of Honey’ and ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’. A new social realism was joiining the escapist, glossy movies of the mainstream, as pictures explored the realities and the hardships of working class life in Britain.

The East End was to chip in with ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ in 1962, which took the drama out of the claustrophobic confines of the kitchen, living room or bedroom onto the streets and into the pubs of the East End. The Theatre Workshop production was improbably penned by Stephen Lewis (Blakey from ‘On the Buses’), though heavily improvised like all the group’s pieces. And it used lots of location filiming, offering modern viewers a fascinating glimpse of Limehouse, Stepney and Stratford in the early sixties, as well as cameo appearances by Ronnie and Reggie Kray.

But the whole movement was anticipated a decade earlier by ‘It Always Rains on Sunday’. The film, set on one Bethnal Green sunday in 1947 was an exercise in tedium, frustration and anger at the poverty of life in post-War Britain (and not just in the financial sense). Yet it still manages to grip the viewer. Rarely has boredom been so interesting.

The story has former barmaid Rose Sandigate trapped in a joyless marriage with an older man. Life in bombed out Bethnal Green is hard, with rationing still in place, little money and less to do. Into this dull, reliable existence bursts her former lover, who has broken out of prison and begs Rose to hide him. The tough housewife softens and hides him in the air raid shelter. The strain is intolerable, with family life intruding and the police net swiftly closing. Eventually he flees, to be hunted down in railway sidings by police sergeant Fothergill.

And if it’s sometimes melodramatic (and a touch unlikely) it does evoke the East End of the later forties, not least because real East Enders are in it. Not Rose - she is played by the impeccably posh Googie Withers. Nor escaped convict Tommy Swann (played by Googie’s Australian husband John McCallum). But Jewish East Ender Sydney Tafler, who was a stalwart of British cinema in the fifties and sixties, often playing spivs and crooks, appears as Morrie Hyams. John Slater, who built much of his career on playing cheery cockneys, was another East Ender playing largely to type, as Lou Hyams. Sgt Fothergill is played by Bow’s Jack Warner (Dixon of Dock Green of course). And the character of Dicey is played by Alfie Bass, born Abraham Basalinksy in Bethnal Green.

Of course a decent actor should be able to play the part wherever he or she comes from. But the authenticity of much of the cast may well have pleased the writer. The film came from a novel written by Arthur Bern, who also wrote ‘Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square’, later adapted for the big screen by Alfred Hitchcock as the movie ‘Frenzy’. La Bern called himself ‘a gallic cockney’ having been born in the East End of French parents. He was a prolific writer, combining a career as a journalist on the Evening Standard, the Evening News (a former competitor to the Standard), the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, with a steady stream of novels. His East End roots and his job as a Fleet Street crime reporter provided plenty of material. Arthur’s books may have been page turners and were regularly adapted for the big screen (other movies included ‘Good Time Girl’, ‘Freedom To Die’ and ‘Dead Man’s Evidence’) but they ranged from gruesome to downright miserable.

‘Nightmare’ follows Roland John Raine QC, whose wife has run off with a gangster, while his daughter ministers to dossers in the East End. The barrister attempts suicide with a bottle of pills and a jug of whisky, but wakes up in a mental ward. The trouble is just beginning though, as Mrs Raine’s gang boss lover is found murdered. The prolific La Bern had a profitable sideline writing biographies of famous murderers, such as Brides in the Bath killer George Joseph Smith and Acid Bath murderer John George Haigh, so he had plenty of material to draw on.

And take ‘Frenzy’, which tracks a serial killer as he rapes and strangles his way around London. Though to be fair to La Bern he hated Hitchcock’s movie so much that he felt compelled to write a letter of protest to The Times, bemoaning not just the ‘distasteful’ content but the hatchet job Hitchcock and his writer Anthony Shaffer had done on ‘the authentic London characters I created’. He described the dialogue as ‘a curious amalgam of an old Aldwych farce [and] Dixon of Dock Green’. For La Bern, if you were going to do the East End you had to do it right.

The themes, language and characters of ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’Be’ were a disturbing blast of the new for London’s theatreland when the play moved up west from Stratford. So it comes as a shock to realise that the irreverent musical is 50 years old this month.

So much about the play was novel. This exuberant and sentimental piece by Lionel Bart and Frank Norman may not seem to share much with the ‘kitchen sink dramas’, and the ‘angry’ writers such as John Osborne, Harold Pinter, Arnold Wesker. But it too played its part in sweeping away the dead wood from the West End. The Shaftsbury Avenue of the 1950s seemed filled with plays that reflected polite Edwardian London rather than a city where Teddy Boys were slashing cinema seats. In the work of Noel Coward and Terence Rattigan, the working classes were represented by minor comedy characters - in Bart and Norman’s play, the working classes (teds and all) took centre stage.

With the background of the two, how could it be any different. The play had been written by Norman, who had followed a troubled road to the East End. He had been abandoned by his mum and dad as a boy, turned out by his adoptive parents, and shunted around a succession of children’s homes before drifting into crime and a three-year prison sentence in his early twenties. Released from jail in 1957 he began writing. First his prison memoir, ‘Bang to Rights’ was a surprise hit. Soon afterwards, Joan Littlewood, who was reinventing theatre out at Stratford East, picked up the draft of ‘Fings’. She handed it to collaborator Lionel Bart and the experimental theatre company had a hit on its hands.

Bart meanwhile was East End to the core. Lionel Begleiter had been born in Stepney, the son of a Jewish tailor. He was a talented painter and a natural musician but seemd to lack the discipline to stick at anything. In the late forties he was expelled from St Martin’s School of Art for ‘mischievousness’. That mischief found an outlet a few years later, first in a string of hits for Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Anthony Newley, then in a run of musicals that drew heavily on his cockney roots.

Bart took the language of the East End and cranked it to within an inch of parody. And in ‘Fings’ he had great material to start with. Jeffrey Bernard, no mean hand with a comic phrase himself, wrote that Norman was “a ‘natural’ writer of considerable wit, powers of sardonic observation and with a razor sharp ear for dialogue particularly as spoken in the underworld”. As any writer knows, there is a wealth of craft and a deal of sweat in appearing ‘natural’. Frank’s renditions of cockney speak is real like the New York slang of Damon Runyon’s New Yorkers is real - colourful, exaggerated and humourous, catching the spirit of the language better than any dry transcription could.

And when Bart got hold of Norman’s play ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’ (it was always dubbed ‘a play with music’ rather than a musical) the great Brooklyn writer might have recognised many of the character types - if he could have understood the words that is. Bart, released from the restrictions of turning out two and a half minute pop songs for Cliff Richard, Tommy Steele and Anthony Newley, went totally to town. He knew he was good. For years he had been writing songs for amateur revues at the left-wing Unity Theatre (a theatre club that had grown from the Workers’ Theatre Movement, itself born in the politics of the 1930s’ East End). But he had also won three Ivor Novello awards for his pop numbers in 1957, another four in ‘58 and two in 1960. By the time he got to work on ‘Fings’ Bart was at the top of his game and oozing confidence.

So Lionel took Norman’s motley crew of spivs, hookers, gamblers, teds and bent coppers and matched his cracking tunes to lyrics that had some among the West End audiences laughing … but others scratching their heads. The references to ‘our local Palais’, trips to Southend and ‘Teds in drainpipe trousers’ were one thing. But the use of rhyming slang and thieves cant (similar to gay ‘polari’, this back slang was only intelligible to those in the know) mystified many in the stalls. The producers thoughtfully produced translations of many of the words in the programme. A few years later, another product of Stratford East, ‘Sparrers Can’t Sing’ would also baffle non-cockneys.

Give it a few years and everybody would expect regional accents and slang in their films, plays, musicals and pop songs. Bart, who probably thought he was, at 29, at the start of a brilliant career, was sadly closer to its end. ‘Oliver!’ followed just a year after ‘Fings’ but the sixties saw a a couple of hits followed by some expensive flops. Norman wrote more autobiography, a string of moderately successful novels, before enjoying an Indian Summer with his three late ‘Soho caper’ novels, featuring Soho private eye Ed Nelson.

* Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be debuted at the Theatre Royal Stratford East in February 1959.
* Frank Norman died in December 1980 of Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
* Lionel Bart died in 1999 of cancer.

These days, most of our entertainment takes place indoors – the TV or video, the cinema, a concert or the theatre.
But the buskers you see on street corners and plying
their trade in the shelter of Tube stations are descendants of a much older tradition.
For hundreds of years, East Enders enjoyed their music and theatre in the streets. And the diversity and sheer strangeness of some of the acts would put today’s street performers to shame.
Strange to say, but religion played a huge part in bringing such secular delights as jugglers, tumblers, stilt-walkers and fire eaters onto the streets of the East End.
Homeless clerics
When Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and priories between 1533 and 1540, huge numbers of clerics were thrown out of work and, literally, out onto the streets.
Minstrels and entertainers had always congregated round the abbeys, because that was where the crowds were. In the early Middle Ages, London and the whole of Europe was being continually criss-crossed by people walking on pilgrimages to holy sites – they were the package tours of the day.
Fairs grew up at the gates
of the East End monasteries, with the purpose of extracting money from the holidaying
pilgrims.
And so when the Augustini-ans at Aldgate and Shoreditch, Franciscans at the Minories and the nuns at the hospitals of Bishopsgate and Bedlam found themselves needing to earn a crust, many turned to street entertaining themselves… with mixed results.
John Evelyn kept a diary detailing his trips into the East End in the 1600s, and went out of his way to see some of the more bizarre acts. He told of: “A sort of cat with a monkey’s body… the hairy woman whose eyebrows covered her forehead, whose ears sprouted hair, and whose face was adorned with a thick beard and moustaches.”
The Turk, meanwhile, climbed with his toes up an almost vertical rope attached to a church spire and slid down head first. The Turk also danced blindfold on the high wire with a small boy attached to his foot, then did a headstand on a mast.
Richardson the fire eater had a spectacular act for the crowds at Aldgate in the 1600s. He chewed and swallowed burning coals, then downed melted glass and, for an encore, put a hot coal on his tongue and cooked an oyster on it, finally swallowing the lot. As light refreshment after this, he washed it down with flaming pitch, wax and sulphur.

Punch and Judy
In the mid-1600s, an enduring favourite arrived when Punch and Judy was imported from Italy. Then in 1835, the Chinese Shades was brought from China to Limehouse. Punch and Judy men switched to this new shadow show for night-time work.
The Victorians were enraptured by the new discoveries of science, and the Microscope Exhibitor worked night and day opposite the London Hospital. Objects were placed on a wheel at the back of a microscope and inspected in turn – a flea, a human hair, a cheese mite, a droplet of water. The Whitechapel site was favoured because of the exceptionally good light.
Stilt-walkers were popular, and, of course, could be seen above a crowd. The Jellini family was famed in Limehouse for performing ballet on stilts, to a barrel organ accompaniment. And the Commercial Road provided rich pickings for the Street Reciter, who recited Shakespeare backwards and earned a princely 10 shillings (50p) a week.
The rise of the cinema and music hall killed off the street theatre. And these days our homes are warmer, cosier and we have entertainment at the flick of a switch.
But next time you’re settling down to watch EastEnders, remember when the real East Enders were watching and performing on our streets.

When Henny Youngman died on February 24, 1998, at the age of 91 in Manhattan, New York, the world of comedy lost the last of a generation.
Henny was known as the ‘King of the One Liners’ in a career spanning 70 years.
But although he was in a
tradition of the wisecracking Jewish comics who worked New York’s ‘Borscht Belt’ – along with Milton Berle, Jack Benny and Sid Caesar – and seemed as New York as the Empire State and Staten Island, Henny was born Henry Youngman, a Whitechapel lad.
Henny’s parents, like so many thousands of others, had come to the East End from Eastern Europe in the latter years of the 19th century.
Bound for the USA
But they soon found that Whitechapel was lacking in fortune for poor immigrants and, in September 1906, when young Henny was just six months old, they boarded a ship to emigrate to New York, and new opportunities.
Henny’s dad had artistic ambitions for his boy but not as a comedian – he wanted him to become a violin virtuoso. But as one of his fellow comedians quipped in the 1930s: “Henny’s the only guy who, when he opens his violin case, the audience hopes he’s got a machine gun in there.”
Henny worked nights as leader of a band called the Swanee Syncopaters, and it was then, during the late 1920s, that comedy first started to creep into his act. During the band’s performances, Young-man often fooled around with the crowd.
Lucky break
As luck would have it, the regular comedian didn’t show one night and the club owner asked Youngman to fill in. He was a success, leading to more work as a comedian – although Henny admitted that his wife often supported him in the first two decades of show business.
In fact, his wife, Sadie, who died in 1987 aged 82, was the butt of his most famous one-liner: “Take my wife… please!” The quip was actually an off-the-cuff remark before a
radio show, but stuck to Henny, and was the inspiration for the title of his 1973 biography, Take My Life, Please!

In fact, while he was attempting to make his living as a musician, his real professional career was taking place during the day – as a printer in a five-and-dime store.
“But I didn’t have any confidence in a business that was run by a guy like me,” he joked.
“However, if things went sour in comedy, I could always get a job printing… or I could be out of two jobs at once!”
It was the day job that led to the first break in his career. Among his jobs were writing and printing comedy cards, a series of one-line gags that were sold in his store.
Milton Berle – a few years younger than Youngman and already a top comedian – discovered Youngman when he was enticed into the store by a sign for the cards and took an immediate liking to the ‘naturally funny guy’.
A life-long friendship began, although the two often traded barbs: “He once said he was the king of one-liners,” Berle wrote in his 1974 autobiography, “but I told him that was because he couldn’t remember two.”
Youngman would respond: “Milton, is your family happy? Or do you go home at night?”
Youngman’s big break came in 1937 when he appeared on the popular Kate Smith radio show. He was a big hit, staying with the show for two years, leaving eventually to pursue a career in the movies. But except for mostly cameo roles, film stardom never materialized.
His one-line style lent itself better to the club than the screen, so Youngman headed back on the road, averaging nearly 200 dates a year for the next 40 years.
Laugh-In regular
His career was revived in the late 1960s as a regular on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, a TV show that was perfect for his style because it was nothing but one-line gags. “Oh, that Henny Youngman!” soon became a national catchphrase.
He died, rich and successful, in Mount Sinai Hospital, Manhattan, at the end of a journey that had taken him all around the world – via Whitechapel.

Whatever you think of Shoreditch, you’re unlikely to consider it the root of London’s Theatreland. Yet, back in 1576, it was home to the capital’s first playhouse.
Throughout the Middle Ages, plays became hugely popular. But the actors, minstrels, jugglers and the like didn’t perform inside. Instead, troupes would travel from town to town, taking the entertainment to a new audience every day.
They would perform religious mystery plays on church steps, the more ribald productions in inns and taverns.
But the growing popularity of the more formal, many-act plays which were now being produced by the likes of William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson meant that cash could be spent on a permanent playhouse.
In 1576, the great tragic actor Richard Burbage, who was running his Lord Chamberlain’s theatre company out of Shoreditch, raised the cash to build the capital’s first proper theatre.
The Theatre, as it was imaginatively dubbed, lay at the corner of New Inn Yard and what is now Great Eastern Street and it was a huge success.
William Shakespeare joined the company when he arrived in London in 1592 and, in the six years following, Shoreditch saw debuts of the Bard’s earliest work – Henry VI, Titus Andronicus, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet and many more.
Globe timbers
The Theatre was demolished in 1598, its timbers taken to construct the world-famous Globe Theatre at Bankside, which was uncovered again in the 1990s.
But Shoreditch’s theatrical story was just beginning. By now Burbage’s Curtain Theatre was doing a roaring trade at Holywell Lane, opposite the west end of Bethnal Green Road.
Shoreditch itself had started life as a religious, rather than a theatrical, hamlet. Like many villages it was born at the crossing of two Roman roads – in this case Kingsland Road and Old Street.

First mentioned in 1148 as Scoredich, it was the site of the new St Leonard’s Church in the 12th century, and in 1152 the Augustinian priory of Holywell.
But by the late 1500s, Holywell priory was gone and the theatre was built on its redundant grounds. Colourful characters began to replace the holy men who had sought sanctuary from the City.
Many of the players are buried in St Leonard’s churchyard. And in 1598, Ben Jonson fought a duel with Gabriel Spencer in Hoxton Fields, killing him. Spencer’s body lies in the churchyard in Shore-ditch High Street, alongside that of Burbage, and Henry VIII’s jester, Will Sommers.
Around the 1680s, Shore-ditch changed again. Most of the actors had migrated west and it became the focus for charitable works, as men made rich by the City looked to bequeath their wealth.
Geffrye Museum
In 1695, Robert Aske endowed the Haberdashers almshouses and a school in Pitfield Street. Then in 1715, London mayor Robert Geffrye built the Ironmongers almshouses in Kingsland Road – now they house the Geffrye Museum.
By the 1850s, as London’s population boomed, Shore-ditch had a population of more than 100,000. Today it’s the slightly scruffy north-west corner of the East End.
But wander round St Leonard’s churchyard and you can almost see the ghosts of Shakespeare, Jonson and the rest of London’s first theatre community.

Lionel Bart’s music ranged from his greatest success, Oliver!, and musicals like Lock Up Your Daughters and Blitz. His songs such as Living Doll, Rock With The Cavemen and Little White Bull gave chart hits to British rock’n’roll stars like Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele. It was a curious hybrid – but it had its roots in East End soil.

Bart was born Lionel Begleiter in Whitechapel in 1930, the 11th child of a Jewish tailor, and it was his childhood that formed his songs. “Oliver! was a strange marriage of the Jewish music of my barmitzvah and the street cries of my childhood,” he recalled. “Fagin’s music was like a Jewish mother hen clucking away!”

It was a colourful background, but one Bart was fond of embellishing still further. Many of his friends talked of his constant rewriting of his childhood, a habit which drove the ghostwriters of his biography to despair.
Certainly, although he never learned to read or write music, there were early signs of musical ability. Aged six, one of the young Lionel’s teachers told his father that the lad was a musical genius, and his proud dad bought him a violin. Lionel soon got bored with the discipline required and dropped his lessons.

Expelled from St Martin’s

At 16, he decided his artistic future lay with painting, and won a scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art. That didn’t last either, though. He was expelled for “mischievousness”, but didn’t regret leaving the lonely life of the artist in his garret. “I like a good mob working around me,” he explained, an esprit de corps that would be fulfilled in the huge musical productions that were to make his name.

One thing he did acquire during his studies was that name. His bus journey from Whitechapel to the West End every day took him past Barts Hospital, and Begleiter reinvented himself as Bart.

After National Service, Bart set up in business with his RAF pal, John Gorman. With a borrowed £50, they started a printing firm in Hackney. But business was never Bart’s forte – this was the man who later sold the million-spinning smash hit Oliver! for a paltry £15,000, and poured in £80,000 of his own cash in 1965 in a vain bid to save the flop musical Twang!!

Tommy Steele and Soho’s 2 I’s

Anyway, music was changing, with big bands giving way to rock’n’roll, and Bart was spending time up West, mixing with young hopefuls like Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard in Soho’s 2 I’s coffee bar. At the same time as he was producing his first stage show, Wally Pone of Soho, which debuted at the Theatre Workshop in Stratford, he was banging out the hits for Britain’s answers to Elvis. It came easily. He claimed to have written Living Doll in six minutes on a Sunday morning – about twice as long as Cliff took to sing it!

But what came easy, went easy too. Bart was hugely generous with his cash, a legacy, he reckoned, of his gambling father. “There were endless arguments about money,” he said. “I hated money and had no respect for it. My attitude was to spend it as I got it.”

By 1972, Bart was bankrupt, with debts of £73,000, and a huge drink problem. What cash hadn’t been ripped off by casual acquaintances had been poured into unsuccessful stage shows. Often, his pals saw the warning signs in his shows long before he could. His friend Noel Coward, on reading the script of his Quasimodo, remarked: “Brilliant dear boy. But were you on drugs when you wrote it?”

But towards the end of his life, attending Alcoholics Anonymous, and with a percentage of the profits from the stage revival of Oliver!, Bart was reconstructing his life. And Cameron Mackintosh, the producer of that revival, made one of the most telling quotes on Bart’s death. “Of all the people in this business who have had ups and downs, Lionel is the least bitter man I’ve ever come across. He regrets it, but he’s never been sour, never vindictive.”

TALK about British comedy and there is a name that stands head and shoulders above the competition. The Carry On series ran for 30 years – from the gentle post-War approach of Carry On Sergeant to the ironic alternative comedy of Carry On Columbus.
The films are celebrated in a new exhibition at the Museum of the Moving Image on London’s South Bank.*
And for East Enders, the films have a special resonance – Bernard Bresslaw and Barbara Windsor are just two locals who went on to star in the series, and they have been celebrated in East End History in the past. But the Cockney connection goes far deeper – for the man who penned those first few Carry Ons was a Tower Hamlets boy.
Norman Hudis was born in Stepney in 1923. He always had a sharp mind and a gift for words and, on leaving school, he landed a job as a local newspaper reporter, working on the Hampstead and Highgate Express.
War came, and Norman served with the RAF in the Middle East, turning his hand to writing for Air Force News. And like so many of the entertainers who came to dominate British comedy in the ’50s – such as Tony Hancock, Eric Sykes and the Goons – he sharpened his comedy pen writing for the concert parties and camp concerts organised as a tonic for the troops.
It was tougher in Civvy Street however. Back in London after the War, Norman decided to throw in journalism and try his hand as a playwright. He was certainly prolific, but not successful. However one of his works, Here is the News, got good reviews.
These caught the eye of the producers at Pinewood. At the time, south-east England had a thriving film industry, at Pinewood, Ealing and Shepperton, and the money men were always on the lookout for young talent to turn out the features needed to fill Britain’s bustling cinemas.
It was production line stuff – many of the films were destined to be ‘B’ features to the big American movies. But after two years at Shepperton, and with not one film produced, Norman was fed up, and decided to go freelance.

His years of apprenticeship paid off, and he was soon churning out successful scripts. The quality was sometimes iffy, not surprising as at one point Norman was working on three scripts at once!
Fortune took a lucky turn when he bumped into Peter Rogers in 1957. Rogers was already an established producer on the UK film scene, he went on to make more than 100 movies, and he was working on a biopic of the rock and roll singer Tommy Steele. Norman was offered the job of scripting Rock Around the World.
The film was a hit, and Norman was immediately drafted in to pen a swift follow-up, after all, no-one knew how long the singing ex-seaman’s chart career would last! But The Duke Wore Jeans was another success for the pair, this time with director Gerald Thomas on board.
Rogers and Thomas were working together on a production of RF Delderfield’s novel The Bull Boys, and called in the reliable Hudis to rewrite the book for the screen. Dumping the original title as too flat, they selected one of the final lines from the film as a name. And “Carry on Sergeant” was a massive hit.
Norman went on to pen five more Carry Ons. Carry On Nurse was the top-grossing UK film of 1959. Teacher, Constable, Regardless and Cruising followed, one a year, each charting the battles of a crew of bunglers who come through against all the odds.
But by 1962, the team felt the formula was wearing thin. Hudis was replaced by Talbot Rothwell, who took the films in a bawdier and more farcical direction.
The Stepney writer took off for pastures newer and more lucrative. Throughout the ’60s he worked on TV and film in California, eventually moving there full time in the seventies. Episodes of CHiPs, The Wild Wild West, Marcus Welby MD, The Man From Uncle and Buck Rogers are just a few to have flowed from his typewriter.
But of all his writing, the Carry Ons remain closest to his heart. Back in London recently for the 40 Years of Carry On celebrations, he remarked that it was his core of irreverent, risque East End humour that made those comedies. Best of all, 40 years on, people are still laughing!

You may know him as the suavely evil gangland boss Victor Maitland, who torments Eddie Murphy in the 1980s smash movie Beverly Hills Cop. Or the villainous Russian General Orlov, Roger Moore’s adversary in Octopussy.
You may know him better for his own plays, drawing deep on his childhood and teenage memories of East End life, to write and produce East and West. Or maybe as the producer and director of 30-odd years of pedigree avant-garde theatre, adapting and bringing new life to the plays and books of literary heavies like Kafka, with The Trial and Metamorphosis.
Steven Berkoff is a tough talent to pin down – which is probably just how he’d want it – but his road to becoming an international movie star and successful producer and director starts back in the 1930s enclave of East End Jewish immigrants, and an endless succession of dead-end jobs.
Berkoff was born in Stepney in 1937. Berkoff’s father Abraham (Al) ran a tailor’s shop in Leman Street, from which the talented cutter would turn out lavishly-made zoot suits for the West Indians who were already settling in London.
He also catered for East End boxers who were making a name for themselves – Jewish fighters like Ted Kid Lewis and Kid Berg, both world champions.
After the war, the Berkoffs returned to the East End following an ill-fated attempt to settle in the US. Home now was two rooms and an outside loo in Anthony Street, off the Commercial Road.
With chickens in the back yard, it was a far cry from the glamour of New York, but there was plenty to entertain the young Steven.
The Troxy Cinema in Poplar was the local venue for Saturday morning films, and there was the Palaseum at the end of the road for the Sunday afternoon film.
Steven was enrolled at Raine’s Foundation in Arbour Square – a first-rate school – where he was a near-contemporary of fellow playwright Harold Pinter.
And his physical welfare was taken care of by regular dips in the lido at Victoria Park in summer, and at Betts Street Baths, off Cable Street, in the winter.

The East End was a fascinating playground, and the young Berkoff would spend hours in Petticoat Lane market, transfixed by the wares at the stamp collectors’ corner and examining the animals in the now-defunct Club Row livestock market for signs of ill-treatment.
It was a world Berkoff would dip into time and again in his later work.
After a succession of aimless jobs in the fabric and garment trades, miserable stints in West End clothes shops, and a spell working in the US Army PX’s in Germany, Berkoff studied drama in London and Paris.
He worked in rep, appearing on TV in 1960s favourites like The Avengers, before forming his own company, the London Theatre Group, in 1968.
Drawing on his East End memories, Berkoff penned his first original stage play, East, first presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1975.
West, Decadence, Greek, Kvetch, Acapulco, Harry’s Christmas, Lunch, Sink the Belgrano, Massage, Sturm und Drang and Brighton Beach Scumbags followed from the writer’s prolific pen.
Meanwhile, the energetic Berkoff was mounting plays and adaptations in Japan, Germany and Los Angeles – Richard II and Coriolanus for the New York Shakespeare Festival, and touring with his one-man show in Britain, the US, South Africa, Finland, Italy, Singapore and Australia.
But to many he was better known for his film portrayals of sinister heavies, revisiting the East End for his role as murder victim George Cornell in the film of The Krays.
And, at 61, the former East End boy is still busy, with his new book of short stories, Graft, now in the shops, and a run at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, in Shakespeare’s Villains.
Graft – Tales of an Actor,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN:1 84002 040 7, £12.
Free Association:
An Autobiography,
by Steven Berkoff,
ISBN: 0 571 19629 6, £7.99.

“I didn’t invent Alf Garnett, I just grassed him up.”
Johnny Speight, who died last week at the age of 78, always maintained that his most famous creation was as much documentary as fiction.
“I get most of the material for Alf standing around in pubs, all I really am is a recorder,” claimed the man who made Wapping famous.
His sharp ear for East End dialogue and wit was honed as a boy in east London, and a lifetime of observation.
And if he despised the spoutings of bigoted Alf – in later years, misguided critics would criticise the show itself as racist – he realised that the best way to puncture prejudice was through the common sense and humour of his cast of cockney characters.
Speight was born in Canning Town on June 2, 1920, the son of a London docker, and left school at 14.
“I hated school,” he said. “We used to think you were lucky if you got TB because it got you off. If one of the
kids had it, we’d get him to breathe all over us, or spit in our sandwiches.”
The obstinately healthy Johnny was soon out at work in a variety of jobs, working for East End firms while practising his real love, jazz, in a succession of bands at night.
He played drums in the Syncopated Rhythm Boys, Howard Wynn-Jones and his Big Broadcast Band and Johnny Speight and his Hot Shots before war intervened.
Back in London in 1945, he returned to a succession of hated jobs – among them a spell as an insurance salesman – before he fell, almost by accident, into his true love, writing.
Johnny had become a voracious reader and was constantly coming across the witty sayings of writer and philosopher George Bernard Shaw.
“They were so funny, I imagined him to be a stand-up comic, like Tommy Trinder!” he admitted.
But one day, leafing through Canning Town Library, he came across a whole shelf of books by the prolific author.
“I thought: ‘Blimey, he writes books too!’” he laughed.

He started devouring Shaw’s work.
“It was like a divine revelation,” Speight recalled. “It was as though a light had been turned on and every dark recess lit by sweet reason.”
Johnny’s reading now turned to the modern classics of Chek- hov, Ibsen and Strindberg and he wrote a succession of worthy but very dull plays on the evils of capitalism before finding his true place in literature.
He began writing for the new generation of radio comedians, most, like himself, recently returned from active service.
Frankie Howerd, Eric Sykes, Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Arthur Askey, Morecambe and Wise. The list of artists who benefited from his sharp comic eye was endless.
And he began to work with Galton and Simpson, writers for the immortal Tony Hancock and creators of Steptoe and Son.
A bigot is born
But it was in 1964, with a one-off play in the BBC’s Comedy Playhouse series, that Alf Garnett was born and Speight found fame and riches.
The resultant series, Till Death Us Do Part, ran in various guises until the BBC scrapped the final series of In Sickness And In Health in 1995, bowing to complaints about Alf’s foul language
and his utterings on lesbianism and Aids.
Many of the people who watched Alf never really got the joke and neither did the BBC.
Dennis Main Wilson, producer of the first series, said: “There was something about the way the studio audience laughed at certain lines. It’s likely a large proportion of the 20 million who watched did so for the wrong reasons.”
But Johnny resolutely defended the need for Alf. After the show was cancelled, he said: “It was legislating against people’s thoughts … all debate was being stifled.
“I didn’t invent Alf, he was created by society. Unfortu-nately, the world is full of Garnetts, not just in the working classes, in the middle and upper classes too.
“If you make fun of them, people are more inclined to think about it. If you never mention it, it just goes on.”
It was a dash of East End plain-speaking and common sense the BBC would have done well to listen to.

WHEN king-size actor Bernard Bresslaw collapsed and died in June 1993 generations of Carry On fans mourned the loss of a giant comic talent.
But his last role spoke volumes about the paradox of a well-read East End lad who could turn his hand to any role – yet was always cast as an amiable idiot.
Bresslaw was born in Stepney in 1934, the son of an impecunious tailor’s cutter, himself a descendant of Jewish Polish immigrants.
The young Bernie was a giant from birth, weighing in at 10lb 4oz and wearing size nine shoes before he hit his teens. The shoe size was a big disappointment to his mum – she wanted him to be a tap dancer. But Bresslaw had dreams of his own.
He could have followed his dad into the rag trade but instead was inspired by his English teacher, at Mile End’s Coopers School, to follow his dreams of acting.
He applied to the top actors’ school, RADA, was accepted, and swiftly showed his potential in the Academy’s performance of Christopher Fry’s Venus Observed, not only winning the Academy’s Emile Littler Award as Most Promising Actor but personal plaudits from the playwright himself.
Bernard graduated and went into a notoriously tough form of rep – playing RAF and Army camps, Borstals and mental hospitals.
It was a tough baptism into the business but one that stood him in good stead. He later said that the demands of keeping happy the demanding all-male houses – who would soon let you know if you weren’t up to scratch – was superb discipline and training for his later career.
“Like facing hostile fast bowling,” he laughed.
Bresslaw always prized his classical actor’s schooling but it was a different sort of training that set him up for his big break.
The Army Game ran from 1957 to 1962 becoming the BBC’s top sitcom. Bresslaw drew on his National Service years as a driver/clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps to create the role of gormless giant Private Popeye Popplewell.
Financial security, a spin-off film I Only Arsked and even a string of hits with pop singles followed – all with Bernie in character.
Bresslaw was a household name and his fame grew when, in 1965, he took on the first of 14 Carry On roles. Indian brave Little Heap in Carry On Cowboy, warrior Bungdit In in Carry On Up The Khyber, sinister butler Sockett in Carry On Screaming, Bresslaw played them all while pursuing his classical career in the theatre.
Roles in Two Gentlemen of Verona, Much Ado About Nothing and A Midsummer Night’s Dream gave him artistic satisfaction in his work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Young Vic and the Chichester Festival Theatre.
But the heavy workload drove him to exhaustion and a collapse at a 1992 showbiz dinner.
In the Eighties, virtual blindness threatened his career and his love of reading Racine, Milton and history. But a pioneering operation at Moorfields’ Hospital saved his sight and he was back on stage.
And it was there that the comic giant died – not as Bungdit In or Popeye but in the sort of role for which he craved recognition – waiting to go on stage as Grumio in the Taming of the Shrew at the open air theatre in Regent’s Park.