INTRODUCTION

HE wrote some of the best, most popular, most enduring songs of the past 60 years. He had a breathtaking theatrical imagination. He was as complex, flawed and damaged as a proper human being should be. His story is extraordinary, and, from a narrative point of view, near perfect – with three acts, a journey, a climax, a crisis, a catharsis and a calming denouement. These seemed like good reasons for writing a biography.

A cheerful economics lecturer we got chatting to at the British Newspaper Library told us that his uncle used to be Lionel Bart’s postman. He regaled us with a labyrinthine tale about a parcel. A hotel receptionist in Cornwall told us she had once been a contestant in a beauty contest judged by Lionel Bart. She was unplaced. Marty Wilde’s chiropodist did Lionel’s feet as well, and when he’d finished the feet he would take Lionel’s musical dictation. Most London taxi drivers over the age of, say, 50, number themselves among Lionel’s closest friends.

After a bit you begin to suspect that everybody in the world has a Lionel story. The problem for the biographer is not one of finding material but of avoiding it. That and sifting the fragments that could be loosely based on fact from the rubble of hearsay and rumour and exaggeration.

Lionel himself, of course, was a major source of inaccuracies about the life and times of Lionel Bart. He’d invent and embroider stories to favour journalists with good copy, to big up his latest project, to take the piss, because he couldn’t be arsed with the pedantic tedium of reality, but mostly because the lie – his lies, anyway – were usually neater, funnier and more satisfying.

When the anecdotes lie so thick, it’s also difficult for anybody to keep clear the notion that the guy you’re talking about was a major figure in the history of music and theatre. So while there have been works of academic criticism written about, for instance, Stephen Sondheim, Lionel’s mastery of internal rhyme and bold use of tritones are always pushed into the background by the racy anecdotes and one-liners. It’s partly the result of Lionel’s inability to stay po-faced about his life and work for more than a couple of sentences (or, to put it another way, it’s Stephen Sondheim’s fault for not hanging out with Keith Moon).

Lionel loved vulgarity. His earliest efforts at lyric-making were in the playground. He’d invent mucky words for the latest pop songs in exchange for a turn on roller skates. It was a skill he prized throughout his life. Vulgarity is a precious, life-affirming commodity, but it rarely wins honorary professorships or the Prix Goncourt.

If you can tear your gaze away from the gags and vulgarity, though, you quickly realise they’re shielding a formidable clutch of achievements. The magnificence of Oliver! is generally acknowledged, but there is little recognition of Lionel’s pioneering role in, say, the creation of the British rock and pop industry that went on to dominate the world: his continuing contribution to that industry as pal, mentor, financier and host to The Beatles, the Stones and their managers; his pre-Beatles conquest of America; his pre-David Bailey, pre-Terry Stamp, pre-Michael Caine, pre-John Lennon invention of what a working-class hero should do, wear and think; or even the blessed wonder of his hats. The sheer range of his work astonishes, too. We have encountered people who simply refuse to believe that he worked extensively in political and experimental theatre, that he wrote ‘From Russia With Love’ – words and music – or that he was once in a position to demand official Universal Studios headed notepaper for a teddy bear named Spencer Tracy.

Another difficulty is the sneer. You come across it all the time. A lot of people ever-so-slightly sneer when they speak of Lionel, as if extending an invitation to share an awareness that there was something not quite right about him. If asked to be more specific they’ll mist over and maybe say, “Didn’t he steal most of his best tunes?” – a common calumny that is no more justified when applied to Lionel than it is about any other composer – possibly less so. Or they’ll hint at a generalised sort of naffness, the way one might about, say, Jeremy Clarkson or Gyles Brandreth.

Maybe it’s aftershock. Lionel’s career, from first hit to first majestic flop, lasted about nine years. His success in the charts and onstage was unprecedented. His spectacular fall, with Twang!! the musical with more exclamation marks than tickets sold, made headline news for weeks, and reduced his reputation to brickdust. The usual story, oversimplified and inaccurate, was that this precipitated his slide onto bankruptcy and alcoholism. Are the ripples resulting from that cataclysmic fall still settling, perhaps, causing wobbles in the folk memory? “Lionel Bart … wasn’t he the bloke who … did something … sort of bad … or silly?”

The main text addresses itself to the snobbery Lionel attracted as a working-class Jew with no formal musical education. That provoked a lot of vile sneering at the time. And he was also the victim of his own bigmouth. His barrow-boy habit of shooting his mouth off as publicly as possible made, for many, the urge to see him cut down to size irresistible. There was a narrative imperative, too. After years of reporting triumph after triumph, editors became desperate for a new angle on the Bart story. Falling on his arse fit the bill to a tee.

But the sneer’s probably mostly related to the vexed question of cool. When Lionel was making hits with Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard and Anthony Newley in the late Fifties, it was desperately uncool to be British. Even now critics single out ‘Move It’, the song that Ian “Sammy” Samwell wrote for Cliff Richard, as the first ‘proper’ British rock’n’roll record on the grounds that it sounded most like the American product. Lionel’s songs – ‘Do You Mind?’, ‘Rock With The Caveman’, ‘Living Doll’ and the rest – carried the evocative aroma of the chip-shop. In later years Ray Davies, Ian Dury, Pulp and Blur were revered for being so resoundingly British, but back in 1957 it was the antithesis of cool.

And by 1964, when British pop was the coolest pop in the world, Lionel had become the toast of musical theatre in the West End and on Broadway, which was, of course, uncool. He was also, at 34, old enough to be a Beatle’s uncle.

Britpop when he should have been Yank, showbiz when he should have been pop, riding the crest when he should have been up-and-coming, 37 when he should have been 17, ahead of the pack when he wanted to run with them, Jagger and Richards could have written ‘Out Of Time’ just for Lionel.

The people who really knew Lionel, his close friends and colleagues, slag him off something terrible. They tell tales of his monstrous egotism, his infuriating obsessions and his white-faced rages. But then they smile indulgently and talk of his generosity, his vulnerability, his charm. He had the magic power to make people love him unconditionally.

We started the research for this book wondering whether the sneer could be justified. We never met him, but still he worked that magic.

Caroline and David Stafford, July 2011

One

MORRIS and Yetta Begleiter had six living children at the start of 1930: Stan, Fay, Harry, Sam, Debbie and Renee. The birth of Lionel, on August 1 at Mother Levy’s Jewish Maternity Hospital on Underwood Street, brought the tally up to seven. He was indisputably the baby of the family, six years younger than Renee; an afterthought or, as he put it, “the last shake of the bag”.

Dad was a tailor, with a workshop in a ‘shed’ at the bottom of the garden next to the outside lavatory. On a good week he’d turn out 50 ladies’ coats. In the early days, at least, there weren’t many good weeks.

Among the poor, there are many gradations of poverty. East End Jewish poverty was even more intricately calibrated. Harry Landis, who later worked with Lionel at Unity Theatre, can remember as a very small child having to go with his mum to the Jewish Board of Guardians in order to plead their case for a soup-kitchen token. They invented a baby sister for Harry, ‘Rose’, who’d been left in the care of a neighbour and made their fiction convincing enough to earn an extra dollop of stew. Compared to Harry’s soup-kitchen poverty, the Begleiters, with a workshop to theirname, were practically bloated capitalists. It’s also likely they’d had it a bit easier in the old country than some of their neighbours.

Morris and Yetta were from Galicia, an area encompassing what is now the South East of Poland into Western Ukraine. No Eastern European country ever provided lasting security for its Jewish communities, but in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they were certainly better off than their neighbours over the border in Imperial Russia. For one or two brief and glorious periods during the 19th century, the Galician Jews fought for and won limited emancipation, but otherwise they endured the usual humiliations and sanctions. At one time, in a bid to prevent ‘them’ breeding, a tax was be levied on Jewish marriage. In 1911, Jews were forbidden to sell alcohol, a move that put 15,000 innkeepers and vintners out of work. But unless a rogue Prince, tired of chasing boar, decided to go hunting in the ghetto, threats to life and limb were infrequent and, despite everything, the Jewish community provided the province with a more than representative sample of lawyers, doctors, professors, entrepreneurs – even politicians.

Family legend has it that Morris was once an officer in the Austro-Hungarian cavalry. Years later Lionel, the artist, painted a fanciful portrait of his dad in the blue and red uniform with cape and frogging.

“My father was a relic from the Austro-Hungarian Empire,” he said. “I think Vienna was the centre, the hub of his universe when he was a young fellah. And I think he was in the army. He took me to see this film about Austrian waltzes, about Viennese waltzes and I remembered all the waltzes, and he was very impressed that I remembered all these waltzes.”

Given the way their son’s career panned out, the Ruritanian-operetta notion of the dashing young Morris Begleiter, booted and moustachioed at some country fair, admired by villagers and townspeople as he leads his Yetta, the Rabbi’s daughter, in a one-two-three, one-two-three, is as tempting as it is almost certainly inaccurate.

Galicia was the arsehole of the Austrian Empire. Paved roads and railways were the stuff of dreams and a summer without cholera something to be grateful for. Every year a few thousand fled west in search of a better life. When the Great War came, the trickle turned into a flood.

In August 1914, the Russian army broke through the Austro-Hungarian defences on the northern borders of Galicia. On September 1 they marched into Lviv, the capital city. By the end of the month they’d overrun the whole province. In every town and village, the Russian soldiers harassed and stole from the Jews. In some places mini-pogroms resulted in beatings,burnings and murder. A quarter of a million decided it was time to up sticks.

The Begleiters travelled as a family: Morris and Yetta – with one baby in her arms and another on the way – and Yetta’s mother. The rapture of reaching British shores was modified when Morris, as an enemy alien, was immediately seized and shipped off to an internment camp.

There were two internment camps on the Isle of Man during the First World War. Statistically it’s likely that Morris was sent to the Knockaloe camp, though, once again, records are scarce: it’s rumoured that mountains of official paperwork relating to the camps were tipped down mineshafts at the end of the war. One of the inmates at Knockaloe was a one-eyed former circus performer and prizefighter by the name of Joseph Hubertus Pilates, who developed a novel regime of health-giving exercises. These he foisted with evangelistic aggression on his fellow inmates, particularly the sick and the lame. As far as can be told, the inmates were not harshly treated.¹ Most finished the war in reasonable health and those who encountered Herr Pilates would have enjoyed uncommonly well-developed core-strength.

Meanwhile Yetta, heavily pregnant and unable to speak English, with an aged mother and a baby son in tow, was left to fend for herself. Somehow she found her way to Whitechapel and contacted friends from the Old Country who were able to give her a roof and the means to keep body and soul together. When Morris came home, a lightning series of pregnancies resulted in another four children being born in the six years between 1918 and 1924.

In the days when the poet T.S.Eliot held down a day job for Faber & Faber, the publishing house, he championed a memoir by Willy Goldman, a ‘proletarian’ writer who had been making a name for himself in The Left Review and New Writing. The memoir, East End My Cradle, contains a pen portrait of one of Willy’s former bosses, a tailor by the name of Mr Begleiter.²

Willy Goldman worked for ten weeks at Begleiter’s ‘sweat-shop’ some time in 1924. “We waded our way through domestic utensils to the workshop. It was adjacent to the lavatory and you had presumably to know which was which by the smell.” He describes the boss as a ‘short, plump, fussy man’, a lazy, self-important bully, who, despite having lived in the country for years, could still read no English other than the back page of The Star, the dockets sent to him by his customers and the names of all venereal diseases. Mr Begleiter confided to the 14-year-old Goldman that he had practised 17 variations of the sexual act. His recreations were “betting on horses, drinking brandy and taking vapour baths” and heattended synagogue only once a year on the Day of Atonement. He paid Willy just sixpence (2.5p) a week, took the view that Willy should in fact be paying him for being taught the business and responded to any argument with, “If you don’t like what I say, you can kiss my arse.”

Years later, Sammy Bergliter, Lionel’s nephew, came across a copy of East End, My Cradle and showed the passage about ‘Mr Begleiter’ to his uncle. Lionel was initially upset. He claimed it must be about a different tailor called Begleiter who had a workshop down the bottom of his garden next to the lavatory. Eventually, though, he grudgingly acknowledged it was a biased but broadly accurate portrait of his dad.

In 1994, ITV’s The South Bank Show made a special in which Lionel is taken to see a modern-day sweatshop, very close to where his father’s would have been. He’s amused by the machinists’ chatting, saying his dad would have imposed absolute silence, and goes on to describe him as a “… slave-driver, and a terrible man.” Immediately he relents. “No he was all right, my dad. My mother always thought he was after other ladies – which of course he was.”

If Morris was a bully, Yetta was never his victim. By all accounts she was a “chuckling little dynamo”, a heavyset woman, a fighter, loud and forthright, with more than a touch of the barrow boy in her make-up.

“My mum and dad had this love-hate thing,” Lionel said. “I was like a go-between. It was ‘tell him this’ or ‘tell her that’. I was brought up in a house were there was always shoutin’ and fightin’ […] so it was rare that one ever got to finish a sentence. I guess that’s how I got so good at one liners.”³

Yetta was 45 when Lionel was born, Morris a few months younger. Lionel was, in every sense, the baby of the family, indulged by his mother and spoilt by his sisters. In the home his glorious self-belief was allowed to flourish unchallenged.

Out on the street was another matter. He was a skinny little runt with sticky out ears.

Those brought up in straitened circumstances adopt any one of a range of attitudes towards their childhood. Some boast about their poverty, thereby making their subsequent success all the more impressive (“There were 27 of us living in a cardboard box”). Some grow dew-eyed about family and neighbourhood (“We never had two brass farthings to rub together, but there’s some sorts of happiness no amount of money can buy”). Some become bitter and angry (“Poverty is the most obscene kind of violence”).

Lionel tried all of these at one time or another, depending on whetherhe was turning up the schmaltz talking about Blitz! (his 1962 show about his wartime childhood) or throwing himself on the mercy of a court. “My mother was 49 when I was born,” he said at the time of his bankruptcy hearing in 1972, “by which time she had very little strength to give me the love and affection I craved. We were a very poor East End family, and not only was I deprived of love, I had no money either. So you can imagine – when I hit it really big with Oliver! …” and so on. Class act.

A fourth option, though – the appeal of which seems to have recommended itself to Lionel at an early age – is to observe one’s life with the eye of a showman; to take a detached professional’s interest in the quality of thrills, spills, tears and laughter the passing parade provides; to regard the whole boshed business as a glorious work of theatre. “Very colourful,” he replied in a 1995 BBC interview, when asked to describe his childhood. “Very noisy, it was. My house was like a Marx Brothers movie.”

The East End, or at least Lionel’s bit of it, has always provided an impressive backdrop to melodrama, comic opera and broad farce. At the time of writing, the incursions of gentrifiers, with their vanilla pods and jogging strollers, have begun to add the odd splash of Farrow & Ball Terre d’Egypte to the bright Bangladeshi glow that’s dressed the place since the Seventies. In Lionel’s day, it was decorated in the blacks, greys and earth tones of the shtetl. A walk along Wentworth Street, between Middlesex Street market and Brick Lane, would take you past Zlotnick’s grocers, Bardiger’s the furriers, Silver’s the drapers, Cohen’s the mercers, Ruda’s the fishmongers, Abraham’s the drapers, Brilliant Harris the kosher butcher and Louis Simon the oil merchant.⁴ It was an overcrowded, smelly, noisy, fidgety place: a show that never closed.

Shoreditch, Whitechapel, Bethnal Green and Mile End were the boundaries of Lionel’s world. Some of it was pretty much unchanged since the days of the Great Fire. There was a proper working blacksmith’s forge next to the United Synagogue. Down the road from his school was Cave’s Dairy, which still kept a herd of cows around the back. Now and then the cows would be taken for a walk down Jubilee Street.

“As a kid in the East End, in streets of terraced houses, we didn’t see cars,” he said. “I was bought up on all the traditional kids’ games – and have since recalled a lot of them in my work – and we could play in the streets very safely. Occasionally you would get a brewers’ dray, with the barrels of beer and horse brasses – we used to jump on the back, until the driver’s whip came over to dislodge us! There was a lot of dried-up horse manure on the streets – I really miss that smell.”⁵

At Petticoat Lane market, a 15-minute walk from Ellen Street – even closer when the family moved to Brick Lane in 1936 – among the clothing and fabric stalls, and the bedding and curtain stalls, in front of the shops selling latkes, lox and herrings, you could watch escapologists and crockery-jugglers, fortune-tellers and weight-guessers. There were barrel organists, cross-dressing skirt-dancers and Wilson, Keppel and Betty clones who’d sprinkle sand on the pavement to do their soft-shoe shuffle. The barrow-boys themselves were acts, parodies of ‘positive thinking’, Max Millering the money out of the punters’ purses. Sometimes the three kings would come down from Spitalfields: the Eel King, the Corn Cure King and Harry the Banana King. Most days you could see Prince Monolulu from St Croix in the Danish West Indies, selling his racing tips – “I gotta horse, I gotta horse” – dressed either in impeccable morning suit with spats and topper, or a kilt of sorts with embroidered weskit and tall feathered headdress. For a few shillings he’d give you a sealed envelope containing the name of a winner, whispering as he did so, “If you tell anybody the name of this horse, it will surely lose.” His lamentable success record suggests that few of his punters could keep a secret.

There were stranger sights, too. An elderly, very Orthodox gentleman was often seen slinking around Lionel’s neighbourhood. In his hands he carried a large sheet of brown paper, or, if brown paper was temporarily beyond his means, a simple sheet of newspaper. On hearing the approaching footsteps of a woman, or, God forbid, accidentally catching sight of one, he would cover his face with the paper and turn to the wall until she had passed by and it was safe to slink some more.

Death came into the drama early in the first act. “My grandmother only spoke Yiddish,” Lionel said.⁶ “When I was good she would give me a farthing and when I was bad she would pinch me and curse me. Terrible curser, she was. I remember her dying. I was only about four or five at the time – four-and-a-half, I think. She was in the only good bedroom in the house – our two up, one down house. She was under a huge feather bedspread and I was playing with my mates in her bedroom. She beckoned to me and said, ‘Labi’ – she always called me Labi – ‘I’m dying.’ So I said, ‘Go on then – die.’ She laughed and laughed. She opened her mouth and I could see her only remaining tooth – her pickled onion spike we used to call it. Laughed and laughed. And then she died.”

For those who preferred their drama in a more conventional form, there were 30 or 40 Yiddish theatres to choose from. The Pavilion, on Whitechapel Road, and the Rivoli opposite were bigger and more sumptuously decorated than anything they had on Shaftesbury Avenue. They boasted

Hollywood stars, too. Paul Muni played the Pavilion; Edward G. Robinson the Rivoli. Food was a vital element in the theatrical experience. At the back of the Pavilion was a huge, unauthorised snack bar. If you couldn’t afford to purchase, you brought a picnic. God forbid anyone should go hungry.

“My mum and dad used to take me to a place called the Yiddish Theatre […] down the Commercial Road. And they played the same plots of these old Middle European stories – by Sholem Aleichem⁷ I think they were. Tiny little theatre called the Grand Palais, and there were these dramas and the leading man, the young juvenile lead, was about 55 with black hair in the days before Grecian 2000 and red Cossack boots. He’d be singing this terribly dramatic song in this scene where somebody had just killed themselves or something and he’d see somebody in the audience, like Mrs Goldblum, and he’d say, ‘Hello, how’s the kids, all right? And your little boy still doing well at school, all right?’ And then he’d go back into the scene. Yiddish people went to see these plays and they knew them. They knew the plays. And I used to make a beeline for the pit and lean over and watch the fiddlers and the drummers and be really close up to the actors so you could really see the greasepaint. I had the buzz even then.”⁸

The best of times and the worst of times – certainly the best of times for spectacle and drama – came on Sunday, October 4, 1936 when Sir Oswald Mosley, founder of the British Union of Fascists, tried to march his Blackshirts through the East End. The Board of Deputies warned Jews to stay away. The Communist Party organised a rally in Trafalgar Square to lure their members away from a possible pitched battle with the fascists. Nevertheless, an estimated 300,000 people turned out to oppose the march. They came together under a slogan borrowed from the Spanish Republicans and Socialists, then fighting the fascist General Franco in Spain: “They shall not pass.”

Some 10,000 police, including 4,000 on horseback, turned out to ‘defend the fascist’s right to march’. In Cable Street, the police charges were fought off with sticks and rocks. Women emptied chamber pots on the coppers’ heads from upstairs windows and pelted them with rubbish and rotten vegetables. Eventually Mosley abandoned the march and held a meeting in Hyde Park instead. At least 100 people were injured in the Battle of Cable Street and 150 arrested; and six-year-old Lionel watched the whole show from the best seat in the house thanks to his eldest brother, Stan – called Shear because of his skill at his dad’s cutting table: “Shear was very bolshie and left wing. He was my hero. He was a champion swimmer, a champion boxer and worked as a docker. He did all thethings a good Yiddish boy didn’t do and I loved him. I used to go round on his shoulders – I was there for the Mosley March on his shoulders at Gardeners Corner.”⁹

Music was a constant. The market had barrel organs, one-man-bands, spoons and bones players, fiddlers and banjo-boys. The pubs had singsongs. The Sally Army had tambourines. In the years between the wars, the core repertoire – a mixture of light classics, wartime favourites and music-hall novelties – was as deeply ingrained as coal dust. ‘My Old Man’, ‘Daisy’, ‘Any Old Iron’, ‘Knees Up Mother Brown’, ‘Roses of Picardy’, ‘Pack Up Your Troubles’, ‘Tipperary’, ‘The Sabre Dance’, ‘The Anvil Chorus’, Delibes’ ‘Pizzicato’ from ‘Sylvia’, ‘The Blue Danube’ and a few hundred others were, give or take local variations, the common musical currency of every British city.

There was music at home, too. “My mother used to sing lullabies and there were street songs and kids nursery rhymes. And games. Of course, the radio was always on. Gracie Fields was always there.”¹⁰

And there was Jewish music everywhere. “I used to go to the synagogue with my dad. Certainly a few times in the year. I loved the music. I loved the sound of that ram’s horn on the Black Fast and Yom Kippur. It said something to me. I didn’t understand what they were blathering on about in Hebrew, but I loved the music.”¹¹ And there was another, more modern, kind of Jewish music, making a splash in theatres, music shops and on the wireless.

The Jewish immigrants in America had encountered a thousand new musical influences: jazz, ragtime, blues, Scottish reels, Irish jigs, French quadrilles. They absorbed, adapted, stole.

Irving Berlin was originally Israel Baline from a village near Mogilev in modern Belarus. Mr and Mrs Gershowitz, parents of George and Ira Gershwin, were from St Petersburg, Richard Rodgers’ family had come from Russia earlier, in the 1860s. Lorenz Hart was the son of Max Hertz, from Hamburg. Henry and Fannie Kern, parents of Jerome Kern, were from Germany and Hungary. Lerner and Loewe, Yip Harburg and Harold Arlen, Sammy Kahn, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim; it is much easier to list the pioneers of American musical theatre who were not Jewish rather than the ones who were and that can be done in two words: Cole Porter. And even he admitted the secret of writing a hit tune was to “… write Jewish tunes.” American musical theatre was, from the outset,

as Jewish as the Shemoneh Esrei or the salt beef sandwich.

Nobody lived more than a short walk from the nearest cinema. In the East End you’d tailor your night out according to your pocket. If you were feeling flash you’d treat yourself to the marble and deco, the mirror-lined restaurant and the throbbing Wurlitzer of the Troxy on the Commercial Road. If you were strapped for cash it was the Ideal on King Street, with its corrugated iron roof and fleas the size of rats. Either way you got to sit in the dark and were allowed glimpses of cars and suits and legs and America. Lionel’s childhood coincided with Hollywood’s Golden Age. In the cinema he heard those songs of Berlin and Gershwin. He took some of his most important lessons in style; he learned about glamour and spectacle; and he first encountered some of the people – Judy Garland in The Wizard Of Oz, Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby, Noël Coward in In Which We Serve — who later became his friends.

Round the corner from Lionel’s house was Dempsey Street mixed infants. By the time Lionel was old enough to start there, big sister Renee had moved on. He was alone, without filial protection. His saviour was cheek. He was Lionel the show-off, Lionel the smarty-pants, Lionel who could talk back in ways that made even the teachers laugh.

Classmates remember him as a clever kid. When he was six, the headmistress summoned Yetta and spoke the words that every mother longs to hear, “Your son is an artistic genius whose talent must be nurtured.”

Morris and Yetta did what they could to nurture their son the genius. When he showed signs of having a decent singing voice, they decided he would become a great cantor. Their ultimate disappointment, bearing in mind the gentle croak his voice matured into, was undoubtedly Judaism’s gain.

When the boy was 13, Morris conceived another ambition. “My dad wanted me to be Yehudi Mehunin, I think. So he bought me this Yehudi Menuhin violin down Petticoat Lane for one and a half pounds – 30 bob – and I was useless. He even paid for me to have lessons down the street. This old man with a floppy bow tie, must have been about 80, Professor Dworzak – he was probably only 50, but he felt like 80 to me then. And the dear man tried to teach me to play the violin. And I was quite good. I played Ave Maria – both versions (pause for self-effacing ‘as if’ chuckle) – and I played ‘The Bluebells Of Scotland’ and I think he then realised I couldn’t handle the instrument. Yehudi Menuhin I wasn’t gonna be. And he suggested I try something else and my mother was delighted. ‘Cos she had these terrible migraines and she used to call it ‘the wailing cat’. She threw the fiddle in the dustbin. She was delighted, my mother.”¹²

His skill with lyrics was better received. In the liner notes to the originalcast recording of Maggie May, he says: “From an early age, when I could first put one syllable words together, I used to take great delight in my prowess at getting an edge on the other street urchins around me because I was good at thinking up and singing spontaneous naughty words versions of the then current pop songs, like ‘Lady In Red’ and ‘Sally’. Every audience for one of my shows represents, to me, an extension of that gang of kids in the East End of London. Every laugh means a free turn on someone’s roller skates, and every first night is like a kerbside debut performance of a brand new naughty song. You see, I was the first in our gang to know all the rude words to ‘My Old Man’s A Dustman’ (not Lonnie Donegan’s version), ‘Eskimo Nell, She Was A Lulu’, ‘Maggie May’.”

Sadly, oral history doesn’t record any of the “spontaneous naughty words versions” that Lionel invented when he was a kid, but it was a skill he liked to show off, when circumstances permitted, all his life. James McConnel, the composer who worked with Lionel in the 1980s, remembers two tiny fragments that perhaps give a taste of the great man’s artistry.

To the tune of ‘On The Street Where You Live’: “There’s a house I know / down on Golders Green / and I bet you’ll never see a house with mould as green …”

To the tune of ‘My Favourite Things’: “Crabs on my rectum and sperm on my nipples / something and something like raspberry ripples / acid that sits on my prick till it stings / these are a few of my favourite things …”

In 1939, Hitler made sure that Act II of Lionel’s childhood would raise the bar for action, spectacle and jeopardy. The synagogue on Philpot Street, with its huge, deep cellar was turned into a bomb shelter. Gas masks were issued to every child at Dempsey Street School and they were shown how to use them. Birmingham, Liverpool and Edinburgh saw the first raids, then on September 7, 1940, wave after wave of bombers with fighter support came for Lionel. And indirectly gave him his first lessons in composition and musical theory.

He was evacuated many times, but disliked the countryside so ran away back to London. “Every time I came back to London, the Blitz got worse. They called me the jinx. ‘Oi, Lionel’s back. Get down the shelters.’“ Finally, they sent him away to Wales. He and two other kids stayed with a farm labourer and his wife. In the front parlour of their little cottage was a piano. In those days the News Of The World printed free sheet music, the popular song of the week. “And above the lyric and the music you’d get the tune in tonic sol-fa, which I could just about handle – Doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah, te, doh¹. And the next octave would have a little dot above theletter. The ones below the octave would have a dot below. And I learned how to write music with one finger from the News Of The World, and to this day that is still the way I remember tunes at the piano. I have to then decipher them and play them to people that write real music.”¹³

A visit by the King and Queen to the shattered East End made a particular impression on Lionel – not because of their show of solidarity, or their bravery, or their innate dignity, but because of their colour. They were bright orange. Pathé News was filming and somebody, presumably fearing that ashen-faced royals would have a detrimental effect on morale, had had the presence of mind to slap on the Leichner 5 and 9 – the greasy foundation universally favoured by the theatrical profession. For the boy it was the revelation of a great truth about elders and betters, and the nature of the world in general. “I knew then,” he remembered later, “at the age of ten, that they were all in show business.”

At the start of the war, Shear, Lionel’s beloved eldest brother, had volunteered for the Scottish Seaforth Highlanders. Nobody knows why. “He must have been the only Jewish cockney with a kilt. He was an amazing guy.”

On leave, in 1943, he went swimming. There was an accident. He drowned.

“I remember the funeral. It was in the summer, and you know how things strike you in a comical way even though it’s very sad for you? But there was a flash – an image. I was in the first floor in my mum and dad’s bedroom above the street … above the parlour. The hearse came and they pulled out my brother Stan’s coffin with the Union Jack on it. On one side of it were the pipers, the Seaforth Highland pipers. Two pipers. And on the other side there was the old yiddishe wailers, professional wailers. And the cacophony of the bagpipes and the wailing – I mean it was just very funny.”

Two

“YOUR son is a artistic genius whose talent must be nurtured,” the headmistress had said, without specifying in which particular branch of the arts the genius lay. As it turned out, at this stage it wasn’t music at all. What Lionel did best was painting and drawing.

At the age of 13, he was one of nine children from across England to win a junior scholarship to St Martin’s School of Art on the Charing Cross Road in the West End of London. Nine kids whose early promise catapulted them into the world of beardie bohemians and the undraped form.

Londoners are territorial. When Tommy Steele was a kid living in Bermondsey, south of the Thames, anything north of the river seemed so remote and exotic he suspected it might be illegal for the likes of him to visit – a suspicion confirmed when, the first time he tried to make the journey north over Waterloo Bridge, he and his mates were stopped and searched by police. Similarly, for East Enders, abroad began at Bishopsgate and, like Tommy, Lionel had hard evidence that over that border lay a land of mystery and wonder. One day he and some pals were walking along the Strand when “… we saw two chaps who looked like Laurel and Hardy. We started whistling their theme tune and, when they turned round, it was Laurel and Hardy! They were staying at the Savoy. My friends ran off, but I was transfixed so they walked back to talk to me. They took me to the Black and White milk bar in Charing Cross Road.”¹⁴

This was his new manor: the Charing Cross Road, where movie stars bought you milk. He was quick to adapt: “I lived almost a double life – an East End boy by night and a Soho Johnny during the day.”

The Soho Johnny learned the ways of Bohemia. The East End boy joined the Victoria Boys Club on Fordham Street where he engaged in healthy pursuits. He proved to be a useful sprinter and took part in national competitions. Despite his avowed distaste for the countryside, he frequently went camping. On one expedition, “I got myself a nose-job when the tent collapsed and I was felled across my hooter.” A proper nose-job to fix the beaky, busted hooter was one of his priority purchases as soon as money started coming in.

He was popular as a draughtsman – everybody in the Boys Club wanted Lionel to do their portrait – and as a songwriter. Fellow campers, now in their eighties, can still remember the campfire sessions. “I was recently talking to my friend Ruth London (her maiden name) who lived in Jubilee Street,” says Phil Walker in his chatty website, Jewish East End of London Photo Gallery and Commentary. “Her father […] was a manager at the Victoria Boys Club on Fordham Street off New Road. She told me about her father taking her to Broxbourne in Hertfordshire for the Victoria Club’s weekend camps and the camp songs they would sing. These songs were written by an 18-year-old club member named Lionel Begleiter. Lionel Begleiter lived in Brick Lane. He changed his name to Lionel Bart and went on to write musical hits like Oliver! So now you know! “

And after the campfire sessions were over, the real fun would begin. Sex did not find Lionel, the Soho Johnny, in a Berwick Street doorway or a Beak Street dive. Sex found Lionel, the East End boy, in a bell-tent where he and a boy called Manny engaged in healthy man-on-man action and Lionel, if he hadn’t known it all along, began to realise why he found it so easy to make friends with girls – although he never felt ‘that way’ about them – while around boys he often grew a little bit shy, or hyperactive which amounts to the same thing.

At St Martin’s, the Soho Johnny encountered a whole new theatre of ideas and people. “One of the first models I had to draw from was Quentin Crisp [author of The Naked Civil Servant and one of the ‘stately homos of England’] and he was a very good model, I mean he used to really do a good pose. And many, many years later when he became famous as the Naked Civil Servant, I said hello to him. I said, ‘I’m Lionel,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I remember you, Lionel Begleiter.’ He remembered my real name. I said, ‘That’s incredible, I didn’t think many people knew that.’ He said, ‘You remember when I was a model and you were a baby at that school, you bought me a cup of coffee in the tea break, and you actually said good morning.’ And he said, ‘I’ll never forget that because nobody had spoken to me for two and a half weeks.’ At that time people were petrified of me – they’d walk across the road – they wouldn’t be seen with this man withthe pink hair and the nail varnish peeping through the sandals.”¹⁵

There is a photograph of Lionel in these St Martin’s days. He wears a fluffy mohair sweater. Even though the photo is black and white, you know the socks are yellow. Sartorially this puts him in the avant-garde of the avant-garde. Lionel’s face in the photograph is even more striking. This is not the face of a street kid, or even a wide-boy making animpressive fist of chancing it up West. This is the face of an intellectual. Possibly even the face of a French intellectual. The photo leaves us in no doubt that Lionel had not just figured out how to do art school: he had figured out how to do it cooler and cleaner than anybody before or since.

This is not to say he was a model student. He was suspended at least three times. He found a telescope and trained it on the upstairs windows of the Phoenix Theatre, across the street from St Martin’s and “created a scenario” about salacious goings on that could be viewed, charging fellow students a penny a look. The authorities got wind of it. Another time he sawed halfway through the back legs of a chair, “and this poor lady model called ‘Radishes’ because of – well never mind, that’s another story – went arse over terrible things.” The authorities got him for that, too. Another time he was suspended for drawing erotica which, Quentin Crisp in a posing pouch notwithstanding, was frowned upon.

At sixteen, he mounted his first exhibition at the college. “… paintings of pregnant women. I was attracted by the look in their eyes and their all-over glow.”¹⁶

His talent, judging from work still in existence, was unmistakable. But it’s a small sample. As soon as he left home, his mum had a good clear out and the collected works of Lionel Bart, including many major works in oil, became landfill. But Lionel was constitutionally unsuited to the atelier. “I gave up painting because painters work alone,” he said later. “And I like a good mob working around me.”

Philip Zec was a Jewish socialist graphic artist. Like Lionel, he’d won a scholarship to St Martin’s at an impossibly tender age. After college he went into advertising, then, in 1939, became political cartoonist for the Daily Mirror. He distinguished himself during the war by pissing off both Hitler and Churchill: his portrayal of Nazis as vermin, reptiles and scum earned him a place on Hitler’s black list; his critiques of wartime profiteers lining their pockets at the expense of front line troops provoked questions in the House of Commons and threats to have the paper closed down.

Zec eventually became the Mirror’s strip-cartoon editor, a role that gave him – theoretically at least – responsibility for the paper’s primary asset, Norman Pett’s and Don Freeman’s Jane, the girl who put the strip into strip-cartoon. Running since 1932, Jane charted the adventures of an ingénue to whom clothes simply would not stick. High winds, snagging fences, rogue aeroplanes, cow’s horns, bombs, parachutes – it was as if the whole world was conspiring to get Jane down to her scanties. Even Churchill rated her as one of Britain’s most formidable secret weapons andwhen she appeared without even her scanties it’s reckoned the British forces in North Africa advanced an extra five miles.

Lionel went straight from college into Zec’s studio. His time there, though short, is significant for two reasons. First, because it was the only ‘proper’ job that Lionel ever held and as such should be celebrated. And second because, by his own account, while he was there he in some way participated in the creation of the Jane strips, an experience that would have attracted as much kudos among the lads in those days as boasting you once worked as senior nipple stimulator for Nuts magazine would in these.

In the autumn of 1948, the job came to a bitter and brutal end when Lionel’s enlistment notice thudded through the letterbox, together with four shillings (20p) advance pay, a railway warrant and instructions to report for basic training to RAF Padgate. The National Service Act committed all reasonably healthy 18-year-olds to an 18-month sentence in His Majesty’s Armed Forces.

Padgate is on the outskirts of Warrington, then in Lancashire, now in Cheshire, famous for rugby league and its illustrious role in the history of wire mesh manufacture. To Soho Johnny, a Siberian labour camp would have seemed more inviting. Compared to the Army and the Navy, the RAF was generally considered the soft option, but that must have provided scant consolation when, on December 7, Lionel got on the train at King’s Cross.

In accordance with the impeccable rules of narrative structure that his life so often obeyed, at this moment, when his spirits were at their lowest, he stumbled upon the best bit of luck he ever had. Sitting opposite in the train carriage was a ginger-headed East Ender who was also bound for Padgate. His name was John Gorman and he would remain a constant source of good in Lionel’s life for the next 50 years. He also wrote an invaluable autobiography, Knocking Down Ginger,¹⁷ which gives an unvarnished and reliable account of their friendship.

John Gorman was born within days of Lionel, only a few miles away in Stratford, London E15, opposite the Forest Gate Sick Home for ‘imbeciles’ and expectant mothers. With only mum, dad and one sister in the family, the Gormans’ three-bedroomed house must have seemed luxury compared to Lionel’s “one-up, one-down”. To supplement dad’s less than adequate carpenter’s wages, though, at least one of the rooms was usually let out to lodgers and, when dad went off to war, mum had had to take in washing and go out cleaning to further supplement his 35 bob (£1.75) army pay.

John won a scholarship to grammar school and, in 1946, wasapprenticed to a silk-screen printer. His innate bolshiness manifested itself straight away. On the day he got his first union card, he started a campaign (which failed) to turn the workplace into a union-only closed shop.

He described Lionel, sitting on the train, as “… a lad of my own age, with a downcast expression, jet black wavy hair, a wide-shouldered bespoke draped suit and a tie with a broad Windsor knot.” To John, the lad seemed impossibly glamorous.

At Padgate, they stuck together through the medical examination and in the queue for uniforms and paybooks with the result that they were allocated consecutive service numbers. Gorman was 2416698, Begleiter 2416699. This proved serendipitous. It meant that for the entire 18 months of their conscription, they shared billets, were posted to the same stations and worked in the same sections.

They stuck together in the barracks, too: in the intimate and intimidating company of strange men from all over the country, any or all of whom could, and probably did, nurse a range of irrational prejudices about cockneys, college boys, Jews and smart arses – all boxes that Lionel ticked with a thick black crayon. As always, he kept the bullies at bay with art – taking out his sketchpad and drawing their likenesses as they huddled around the stove.

Basic training lasted from eight to 12 weeks. Mostly it consisted of bull: obsessive-compulsive cleaning, polishing, marching, saluting and standing still, which had the effect of turning a disparate group of undisciplined 18-year-olds into a very pissed off disparate group of undisciplined 18-year-olds. Guns were cleaned and lubricated by drawing a flannel soaked in oil through their barrels. All webbing had to be treated with ‘Number Three Green Blanco’. Buckles, badges and buttons were brought to a blinding shine with Brasso. Trouser creases you could cut your wrists on were created with damp brown paper and a defective iron.

John Gorman described their first parade.